As lockdown continues, a City Council bill would make the city carve out space where restaurants could serve people outside.
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New Jersey reported 66 more virus-related deaths, while New York reported 74.
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City Council pushes to expand outdoor dining.
With the weather getting warmer and New Yorkers getting antsier, the New York City Council wants to force Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hand on outdoor dining.
The Council planned to introduce legislation Thursday afternoon, backed by the restaurant industry, requiring the mayor to find a way to open streets, sidewalks and public plazas to outdoor dining.
Corey Johnson, the Council speaker, and Councilman Antonio Reynoso of Brooklyn are spearheading the effort.
Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a business group, said the idea was to require the mayor to establish a framework to identify appropriate places for restaurants to sell food and beverages outside, and create a mechanism by which businesses and community boards could submit suggestions.
The bill would also require the city to set health and safety requirements for such operations.
“Our hope is there may be areas where entire streets could be shut down for restaurant service,” Mr. Rigie said. “Other places you may be able to extend the sidewalk, while keeping a lane of cars and bike lanes. Other places, you may be able to use pedestrian plazas. We really need to be creative.”
Last week, 24 council members sent a public letter to Mr. De Blasio urging him to create more space for outdoor dining, citing similar efforts in Tampa, Cincinnati and Lithuania.
“New York City faces urgent crises on many fronts — but we must make sure that our bars and restaurants are able to survive and recover,” they wrote.
At the mayor’s daily briefing on Thursday, he noted that restaurants and bars were not among the businesses included in the state-permitted first phase of reopening, which the city hopes to enter in early June.
When they do come online, though, Mr. de Blasio said, “I’m hopeful that the outdoors can be a big part of the solution.”
Just east of the city in Nassau County, the county executive, Laura Curran, said on Twitter on Thursday that she planned to close main streets to vehicles in towns across the county this summer for dining and shopping, “creating a town square feeling with safe social distance.”
N.Y. businesses can deny entry to people not wearing face coverings, Cuomo says.
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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday he would issue an executive order authorizing any business in New York State to deny entry to people who were not wearing face coverings.
“We’re giving the store owners the right to say, if you’re not wearing a mask, you can’t come in,” Mr. Cuomo said. “That store owner has a right to protect themselves. That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store.”
Mr. Cuomo also delivered the state’s daily fatality report: 74 more people died of the coronavirus, about the same as the previous two days.
At least 200,000 may return to work when N.Y.C. starts reopening, mayor says.
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Between 200,000 and 400,000 unemployed New Yorkers could head back to work when the city begins the first phase of reopening, which could come as soon as early June, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday.
The figure represents over 20 percent of the 885,000 private-sector jobs that the city has lost during the pandemic.
Under the state’s phased reopening plan, when a region meets seven health-related benchmarks, construction and manufacturing can resume, along with nonessential retail sales for curbside or in-store pickup only.
“The vast majority say they’re ready,” Mr. de Blasio said of the city’s shuttered business operations.
New York City is the only region in the state yet to meet all seven benchmarks — it does not have enough hospital beds available or contact tracers in place.
More than 40 million people — approximately 1 in 4 U.S. workers — have lost their jobs nationwide because of the pandemic, the U.S. Labor Department reported on Thursday.
Who’s still getting sick two months into lockdown? Lots of people.
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Just because the curve is flattening and New York City remains on lockdown, it doesn’t mean people aren’t getting sick.
In the past two weeks, nearly 50,000 people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tested positive for the coronavirus, more than 13,000 in New York City alone.
Who are they? Essential workers, one doctor said. Essential workers’ families, said another. The elderly. People in poor neighborhoods in the Bronx. People living in such crowded conditions that social distancing within the home is impossible. Outside the city, farm workers.
The Times talked to doctors, health officials and patients themselves to try to understand who is still getting sick, and why. The portrait is still emerging.
One 52-year-old woman named Maria, who delivers meals to the elderly in Bushwick, Brooklyn, said she had done everything she could to avoid the virus.
She sprays the inside of the delivery truck with Lysol before she gets in. She hangs her clients’ meals on the doorknob and leaves before they open the door, and she changes her gloves after each delivery.
At the public-housing building she lives in, she does not get in the elevator if someone else is in it. Her son does not leave home without a mask, nor does her 17-year-old granddaughter.
Her husband is an essential worker, too — he works in a supermarket. But he tested negative recently.
But somehow Maria started to feel congested in early May, and when she got tested, the result came back positive.
“It’s a mystery,” Maria said. “That’s what I was telling the doctor — how is that possible? She says, ‘You know Maria, this is something that we’re learning about every day.’”
Lights. Camera. Makeup. And a carefully placed 1,246-page book.
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It is 46 years old, weighs nearly four pounds in paperback and is about as ill-suited for the internet age as they come: The book is not even available for digital readers.
And yet, in certain circles, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” the 1,246-page tome by Robert Caro, has become a breakout star of the Covid-19 era.
In TV interview after TV interview with journalists and politicians working from their homes in New York City and beyond, “The Power Broker,” Mr. Caro’s magisterial 1974 biography, is often conspicuously visible in the background, its bold red-and-white spine popping out from the screen, the ultimate signifier of New York political sophistication.
Representative Max Rose, a first-term Democrat who represents Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn, acknowledged intentionally placing the book stage right of his head.
The book also appears behind Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post, and next to the White House reporter for The Associated Press, Jonathan Lemire. For many reporters on NY1, the cable news network, the book has become a must-have, must-be-seen accessory.
One anonymous New York journalist has documented some of the sightings with a Twitter feed, @CaroOnRoomRater.
“I think, like a lot of people, I stare at the books in the background of every cable pundit’s shot from home,” said the writer, who asked to remain anonymous so that his name would not be forever associated with the Twitter feed.
The sightings have also garnered the attention of the 84-year-old biographer himself.
“Watching television during the last few weeks has been quite a stunning and humbling experience for me,” Mr. Caro said.
“The Power Broker” tells the story of Mr. Moses, a New York City urban planner whose mastery of power enabled him to reshape the face of the New York region, becoming arguably the most able practitioner of politics the city and state have ever seen.
Herd immunity in New York City is not around the corner.
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New York City still has a long way to go before it achieves herd immunity from the coronavirus. That’s one message from a crop of new studies across the world that are trying to quantify how many people have been infected.
The precise herd immunity threshold for the novel coronavirus is not yet clear; but several experts said they believed it would be higher than 60 percent.
A lower level of immunity in the population can slow the spread of a disease somewhat, but the herd immunity number represents the point where infections are substantially less likely to turn into large outbreaks.
In New York City, which has had the largest coronavirus outbreak in the United States, around 20 percent of the city’s residents had been exposed to the virus as of early May, according to tests of people in grocery stores and community centers. So if 60 percent is the threshold, New York City is only a third of the way there.
Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said to
think about immunity in the population as a firebreak, slowing the spread of the disease.
If you are infected with the virus and walk into a room where everyone is susceptible to it, he said, you might infect two or three other people on average. But if most people in the room have already been infected, it makes it much less likely that a large outbreak can bloom.
So far in New York City, nearly 250 of every 100,000 city residents has died of the virus, millions of residents are still vulnerable to catching and spreading the disease, and tens of thousands are at risk of dying.
“We don’t have a good way to safely build it up, to be honest, not in the short term,” Dr. Mina said. “Unless we’re going to let the virus run rampant again — but I think society has decided that is not an approach available to us.”
Are you a health care worker in the New York area? Tell us what you’re seeing.
As The New York Times follows the spread of the coronavirus across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, we need your help. We want to talk to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, respiratory therapists, emergency services workers, nursing home managers — anyone who can share what’s happening in the region’s hospitals and other health care centers.
A reporter or editor may contact you. Your information will not be published without your consent.
Reporting was contributed by Michael Gold, Andy Newman, Nadja Popovich, Dana Rubinstein, Margot Sanger-Katz, Matt Stevens and Katie Van Syckle.
