In New York City, a ban on gatherings and the widespread closures of nonessentials businesses were not likely to end before June, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
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Governor Cuomo said that an additional 161 people in the state had died of the coronavirus — the lowest daily death toll since March 27, the last time that deaths were reported under 200.
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New York will begin a limited reopening upstate.
In the most concrete step toward restarting his battered and shuttered state, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Monday that several upstate regions would be allowed to partially reopen this weekend, with limited construction, manufacturing and curbside retail.
“We start a new chapter today in many ways,” Mr. Cuomo said at his daily news briefing, held in Rochester. “It’s a new phase, if you will.”
The move would come 10 weeks after the state’s first confirmed case of coronavirus, which has killed more than 26,000 people in New York, and sickened hundreds of thousands more. But that toll has been largely borne by New York City and its suburbs, with far fewer cases and fatalities thus far in the state’s more rural regions.
Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, laid out a detailed plan for reopening last week, requiring each of 10 regions to fulfill seven metrics. Those include beefing up testing and contact tracing, ensuring hospital capacity, and showing sustained declines in deaths and new cases of the virus.
On Monday, the governor said that all seven metrics have now been met in three regions: the Finger Lakes, which includes Rochester; the Southern Tier, which borders Pennsylvania; and Mohawk Valley, west of Albany.
Two other regions — Central New York and the North Country, in the Adirondack Mountains — were just shy of hitting those benchmarks. Mr. Cuomo said.
Over the weekend, state officials briefed their counterparts in local government about the possibility of reopening, according to a person who was part of those briefings.
Mr. Cuomo cautioned that the reopening would be gradual, and that it was predicated on the infection rate in those regions remaining low. Officials would “be able to pull the plug or slow down the increase in activity” if the virus spread more quickly.
The state’s nonessential businesses have been closed and large gatherings have been banned since March 22, under a stay-at-home order issued by Mr. Cuomo that is set to expire on Friday.
Mr. Cuomo said the state would allow certain low-risk business and activities to resume operating on Friday, including landscaping and gardening work, outdoor recreation such as tennis and drive-in movie theaters.
Mr. Cuomo said the number of new hospitalizations related to the virus was at its lowest number since March 19, before the state’s shutdown began.
The governor also said on Monday that an additional 161 people in the state had died of the virus — the lowest daily death toll since March 27, the last time that deaths were reported under 200. Monday’s announcement also marked the biggest one-day drop in those deaths — down 22 percent from Sunday’s 207.
N.Y.C. will likely stay shut down until June, the mayor said.
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A ban on large gatherings in New York City and the widespread closures of nonessential businesses were not likely to end before June, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday.
“June is when we’re potentially going to be able to make some real changes if we can continue our progress,” Mr. de Blasio said at his daily news briefing.
Both city and state data have suggested that the city has made progress in containing the outbreak of the virus and reducing transmission. Mr. de Blasio has said that social distancing and other efforts to limit the outbreak were making a difference, pointing to decreases in the number of those being hospitalized with the virus and the percentage of people testing positive.
But Mr. de Blasio said that he and other officials needed to see the trend continue before they could consider reopening.
“End of May, beginning of June is when we’ll be able to start filling in the blanks,” he said.
Separately, Mr. Cuomo said that New York City only met four of the seven criteria required to reopen.
In a glimmer of a return to normalcy, the mayor announced that alternate-side parking, which has been suspended for more than a month amid the pandemic, would return to the city for one week so that workers could clean city streets.
Street cleaning will start again next Monday before being suspended on May 25 for at least two weeks.
In an effort to beat back the virus in New York’s hard-hit neighborhoods, Mr. de Blasio said the city would dispatch masks, gloves and medical staff to community health clinics.
The measure is one of several that Mr. de Blasio has announced in recent weeks to address how the virus has disproportionately affected black and Hispanic residents in low-income areas.
In New York City, 38 children have become ill from a virus-linked syndrome.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Sunday that 38 New York City children have been inflicted with a serious new inflammatory syndrome that city health officials say appears to be linked to an immune response to the coronavirus.
That is more than double the 15 cases the city’s Health Department warned of in an alert to city health providers early last week.
The illness, known as pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, introduces a troubling new aspect to the pandemic, which has largely spared children from serious disease. Statewide, at least 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 who have died, two were of elementary-school age, and one was an adolescent, said Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner. They lived in three different counties and were not known to have pre-existing conditions.
On Monday, Mr. de Blasio said that health the emergence of the syndrome had not yet changed the city’s plan to reopen schools as scheduled in September, but that officials were continuing to monitor the ailment.
“Anything we’re going to do about schools is going to be led by health and safety first,” Mr. de Blasio said.
In New Jersey, 72 people have died at a home for veterans.
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The coronavirus has preyed on residents of nursing homes in New Jersey with lethal force, claiming more than 4,850 lives. Deaths at long-term care facilities account for half of the state’s Covid-19 fatalities, well over the national rate.
But nowhere has the devastation been starker than at the New Jersey Veterans Home at Paramus, a state-run home for former members of the U.S. military.
The home is built on the idea that those who served in the military are entitled to dignified care in their twilight years.
Instead, in what some people have called a betrayal of this fundamental pact, the Paramus home is the site of one of the biggest outbreaks in the country.
The virus has swept through the facility, which in late March had 314 residents, infecting 60 percent of its patients. As of Sunday, 72 deaths there had been linked to the virus.
The list of the dead is almost certain to grow: Of the remaining 211 veterans and their spouses, 120 had either tested positive for the virus or were awaiting results. About one in five staff members has contracted the virus, and one employee has died.
“The whole place is sick now,” said Mitchell Haber, whose 91-year-old father, Arnold, an Army veteran, died last month at the home.
“What they should really do is raze it and put a park there,’’ he said. “It’s like a mass shooting.”
A florist and a cemetery in Queens, open for one day only.
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John and Denise Owens, whose family has owned O’Loughlin’s Florist in Queens, since 1965, opened their shop for the first time in weeks on Mother’s Day.
Throughout a sunny morning and afternoon, they helped customers, who pulled their cars over on the side of the street, pick out crosses and wreaths made of vibrant, silk flowers to lay at loved ones’ headstones in the nearby Calvary Cemetery.
The coronavirus outbreak had upended O’Loughlin’s busiest time of the year, the spring weeks between Easter and Mother’s Day. “It’s been tough, it’s been really tough,” Mr. Owens said. “As far as being open, this is a one-day deal.”
The florist, in the Woodside section of the borough, has been closed since late March; Calvary Cemetery also closed its gates to visitors then. But the Trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral decided to open the cemetery, which is under their care, for visitations on Mother’s Day. O’Loughlin’s followed suit.
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Richard Giglio, 82, had stopped by O’Loughlin’s on his way to the cemetery to purchase a memorial candle to place at the grave of his wife, Maryann Giglio, who died last May. Before the pandemic, he visited the site weekly.
“I don’t know when I’ll be able to come here again,” Mr. Giglio said, holding back tears. At the cemetery, he lit the candle and pulled up fistfuls of long grass at the tombstone’s base.
He started to head back to his car but then walked back to the stone, pulling down his surgical mask to kiss and press his hand to his wife’s name inscribed in the stone. He repeated the gesture multiple times, unsure of the next time he would be able to return.
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Reporting was contributed by Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Michael Gold, Elizabeth D. Herman, Jesse McKinley, Azi Paybarah and Tracey Tully.
