New York Today
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In New York City, 38 children are ill from a virus-linked syndrome.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday that 38 New York City children had been diagnosed with a serious new inflammatory syndrome that city health officials say appears to be linked to an immune response to Covid-19.
That is more than double the 15 cases the city health department warned of in an alert to city health providers last Monday.
The illness, known as pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, introduces a troubling new aspect to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has largely spared children from serious disease. Statewide, three children have died of the inflammatory condition, including one in New York City, and state officials were investigating 85 potential cases, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Sunday.
Of the three children that have died, two were of elementary-school age and one was an adolescent, said Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner. They lived in different counties and were not known to have pre-existing conditions.
He also warned that any nursing home operator that failed to provide appropriate care for each of its residents, whether because of a shortage of personal protective equipment or staff, or inability to appropriately isolate coronavirus-positive patients, would lose its operating license.
“The rule is very simple,” Mr. Cuomo said. “If a nursing home cannot provide care for a person and provide the appropriate level of care for any reason, they must transfer the person out of the facility.”
[Coronavirus in New York: A map and the case count.]
Hundreds of homeless people on subways agreed to go to shelters.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday praised the city’s efforts to engage with homeless people and provide shelter for them as the subway shuts down nightly, though advocates continued to urge the city to provide more resources.
Since the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began its nightly closure of the subway system on Wednesday, the city’s Department of Homeless Services has been working with the transit agency and the police to coax homeless people on the trains into shelters.
Mr. de Blasio reported Sunday that 384 people had been approached the previous night, and 175 of them had agreed to go to shelters, while 23 went to hospitals. Friday night, when 416 people were approached, 183 went to shelters and 29 to hospitals. The commissioner of social services, Steven Banks, noted that not every person who was taken to a shelter necessarily entered it and stayed.
What we’re reading
A 59-year-old man was hit by a United States Postal Service truck on Sunday in Manhattan. [amNY]
New York City police officers rescued a man who threatened to jump from the Kosciuszko Bridge. [Daily News]
Michael Halkias, owner of the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn, died from Covid-19. [Brooklyn Paper]
And finally: Working out without annoying the neighbors
New Yorkers have found that working from home, even when home is a studio apartment, is mostly doable. Working out at home, though? That’s another matter.
Since the coronavirus shut down gyms and fitness studios in March, apartment-bound New Yorkers have been struggling to stay fit indoors without driving their downstairs neighbors crazy.
Christopher Ming Ryan, 57, used to do cardio workouts a few times a week at the Planet Fitness near his Washington Heights co-op.
After the gym shut down, he started doing a seven-minute high-intensity workout at home instead. “I found a good one on YouTube,” Mr. Ryan said. “There is some high knee running in place — the woman in the video looks like the girl in ‘Flashdance’ doing ‘Maniac.’”
For several weeks, he was loving how the quick bout of exercise broke up his afternoons. And then he bumped into his downstairs neighbor on the street.
“She asked if I was having work done near the bathroom,” Mr. Ryan said.
Even in normal times, noise complaints are commonplace in apartment buildings, but now there are also adults doing jumping jacks and burpees.
“If you are doing higher-impact workouts, it is going to interfere with your downstairs neighbor,” said Josh Grimm, founder of the health and fitness brand Fitnut, who lives in Chelsea and has been doing remote sessions with clients. “For nine out of 10 of my clients, I’m doing low-impact body-weight-resistance workouts.”
[The small-space workout challenge.]
Luis Paredes, the owner of the West New York, N.J., branch of CKO Kickboxing, said that setting up at-home workouts for his clients had taken a lot of trial and error. “At first I was like, ‘Wow, doing this in the living room, the music is really going to be a factor,’” said Mr. Paredes, who gave his neighbors a heads up that once or twice a day, he’d be bouncing up and down and screaming at a screen.
He added an exercise mat on top of his rug to cushion calisthenic elements and started incorporating noise-sensitive modifications.
“I’ll say, ‘Do a jump squat, but if you’re injured or somewhere you can’t make a lot of noise, just do a squat.’”
Besides mats, pads and modifications, relatively simple gear can also help. After the fitness center and lap pool shut down at 50 West, a high-rise condo in Lower Manhattan, the building started offering online classes and distributing home fitness kits with glider booties, ab wheels and resistance bands — all to keep workouts quiet.
It’s Monday — keep on moving.
Metropolitan Diary: Grilling
Dear Diary:
I had a business on 23rd Street across from Madison Square Park in the 1980s. Once a week, I would order a delicious shish kebab from a street vendor on Park Avenue and 22nd Street. We never spoke, but I knew he knew me.
One day, when it was my turn to order, the vendor handed me his fork and asked me to take over because he had run out of tomatoes.
I took the fork, turned to the other customers and started taking and cooking their orders.
One of my clients happened to walk by. We nodded at each other, and he kept walking without stopping to ask what I was doing.
— Janet Scagnelli
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