Health officials were investigating other deaths of children as possibly caused by a mysterious inflammatory syndrome.
Right Now
Black and Hispanic people have received over 80 percent of the social-distancing summonses issued citywide, according to police figures.
Image
A 5-year-old has died of a mysterious illness linked to the coronavirus.
A 5-year-old died in New York City on Thursday from what appeared to be a rare syndrome linked to the coronavirus that causes life-threatening inflammation in children, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.
It is the first known death in New York believed to be related to the mysterious new syndrome, which officials said began appearing in recent weeks.
Mr. Cuomo said Friday that 73 children in the New York area had been reported to be afflicted with the illness, which doctors have labeled “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”
He said the state Health Department was investigating whether other deaths of children were caused by the syndrome.
Video
transcript
transcript
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare,’ Cuomo Says of Mysterious Illness
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York addressed a rare syndrome linked to the coronavirus that causes life-threatening symptoms in children.
-
The good news about this virus was it didn’t affect children, which was taken as great news, right? Now we have a new issue that we’re looking at, which is something we’re just investigating now. But while rare, we’re seeing some cases where children affected with the Covid virus can become ill with symptoms similar to the Kawasaki disease or toxic, toxic-shock like syndrome that literally causes inflammation in their blood vessels. This past Thursday, a 5-year-old boy passed away from Covid-related complications and the State Department of Health is investigating several other cases that present similar circumstances. This would be really painful news, and would open up an entirely different chapter because I can’t tell you how many people I spoke to who took peace and solace in the fact that children were not getting infected. If you see any of the symptoms that are on the chart that your child is evidencing, caution should be taken because this is something that we’re looking at. And again, there has been at least one fatality because of this. And there may be others that are now under investigation. So this is every parent’s nightmare, right?
“This would be really painful news and would open up an entirely different chapter,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Because I can’t tell you how many people I spoke to who took peace and solace in the fact that children were not getting infected.”
In an apparently separate case, officials in Westchester County, just north of New York City, said on Friday that a child being treated there for the illness had died last week.
The child suffered neurological complications from the syndrome, said Dr. Michael Gewitz, the physician-in-chief at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, where the child was treated.
The county’s health commissioner, Dr. Sherlita Amler, said that officials were still assessing whether underlying conditions might have been a factor in the child’s death.
Mr. Cuomo also announced the state’s daily death toll: 216 more people died, a drop from the previous four days, when about 230 people per day were dying.
N.Y.C. will limit crowds at two parks amid concerns over unequal social-distance policing.
Image
Last weekend, a kind of split-screen photo montage of New York City circulated widely on social media.
One image showed a dense crowd of mostly white people sunbathing in Hudson River Park in Manhattan, apparently flouting social-distancing rules. Another showed a police officer beating a black man in a confrontation that began over an attempt to enforce those rules.
Many people pointed to the two images as evidence that the police were engaged in a racist double standard.
The notion gained further traction Thursday after the Brooklyn district attorney revealed that 35 of the 40 people arrested in the borough for social-distancing violations as of May 4 were black.
On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would address both concerns.
Mr. de Blasio said that the police would limit crowds at two piers at Hudson River Park and another popular park, Domino Park in Brooklyn, starting this weekend.
And concerning the lopsided race numbers in arrests, Mr. de Blasio wrote on Twitter that while summons and arrests were tools for saving lives, “The disparity in the numbers does NOT reflect our values. We HAVE TO do better and we WILL.”
At his daily briefing on Friday, Mr. de Blasio reiterated that the disparity was unacceptable. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions from the data, saying the numbers of arrests and summons were small relative to the city’s population.
“We’re talking about very few people have been arrested and very few people have been summonsed,” Mr. de Blasio said. “And there’s been a huge amount of restraint by the N.Y.P.D. — that’s just factually obvious from the numbers. And we intend to keep it that way.”
Friday afternoon, the police released the racial breakdown of 374 people citywide who had received social-distancing summonses. More than 80 percent were black or Hispanic. This means that black and Hispanic people, who make up about half the population, are more than four times as likely as white and Asian people to have received a summons.
The Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, said he was reviewing the social-distancing arrests in the borough to determine if criminal charges were warranted. His office’s policy during the coronavirus pandemic has been to decline misdemeanor cases that do not involve public safety threats, including social-distancing cases.
The crowd limits at the two parks will take different forms. At Hudson River Park, the police will limit the number of people at Piers 45 and 46 in Greenwich Village. At Domino Park, on the East River in Williamsburg, the city would increase the police presence and monitor crowd sizes.
In both cases, officials would seek to limit the amount of time people spent at the parks.
“If you’re going in, you’re going in for a limited period of time,” the mayor said.
Neighborhood celebrities, lost to the virus.
Image
To live in New York is to know the city as a patchwork of tight-knit neighborhoods defined by local characters: the beloved bartender, the “mayor” of the block, the habitual stoop-sitter, the chatty sidewalk vendor.
And while the coronavirus has claimed the lives of many prominent figures, the wider toll has been on these lesser-known but no less distinctive citizens.
When the city struggles back to a semblance of normalcy, New Yorkers will emerge from their homes and greet one another, only to find gaping holes in the human fabric that fixtures like these helped weave together.
The Times’s Corey Kilgannon paid tribute to five of these characters, including a subway cleaner who sang R&B, a civic-minded salesman who attended the wedding of his local garbageman and a developmentally-disabled woman who dispensed cheery proverbs.
N.Y.C. rent board takes step toward approving freeze.
A one-year rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments in New York City came one step closer to reality after a preliminary vote by the Rent Guidelines Board Thursday.
A proposal that would freeze rents on one-year leases signed on or after Oct. 1, 2020, and the first year of two-year leases, was approved by a 5-4 vote. The final vote will be on June 17. On two-year leases, the proposal would allow 1-percent increases in the second year.
Tenant advocates largely praised the decision, though some said it did not go far enough.
“We see it as an overall win and a historic win for tenants,” said Leah Goodridge, a member of the board who represents tenants, “but we sought a lot more, especially for the essential workers who are helping hold up New York City right now.”
Mayor de Blasio had advocated for a rent freeze and for the board’s meetings to be suspended during the coronavirus crisis.
Several landlords’ organizations had proposed shorter rent freezes, with higher increases in future years that they said would be necessary for landlords to keep up with operating costs.
The Rent Stabilization Association, a landlords’ group, condemned the vote, saying on Twitter that freezing rent “expedited the deterioration of the city’s aging housing stock.”
The association said in a statement, “If there’s going to be a rent freeze, the mayor needs to take the same steps for building owners and enact a freeze on property taxes and water and sewer bills.”
N.J. is closing a makeshift hospital.
New Jersey officials will close one of the makeshift medical stations that had been set up to alleviate the pressure on overwhelmed hospitals, Governor Philip D. Murphy said Friday.
The field medical station at the Meadowlands Expo Center in Secaucus will close this weekend, as the number of virus patients at hospitals continues to fall. As of Thursday night, 4,605 people with the virus remained in the state’s hospitals, the least in six weeks.
Mr. Murphy also announced that 162 more people had died of the virus, bringing the state total to 8,952.
State officials reported the first death of a child in the state from the coronavirus, a 4-year-old with an underlying medical condition. They declined to provide further details.
New Jersey’s governor will be ‘shocked’ if beaches don’t open by May 25.
Image
Governor Murphy said Thursday night that he expected New Jersey’s beaches — among its top tourism draws and a major economic engine — to open by Memorial Day, despite the pandemic.
“I will be shocked if our beaches are not open, but with very specific guidance just as we opened county and state parks,” Mr. Murphy said on NJTV Thursday night.
Mr. Murphy has said for some time that he hoped to see beaches and boardwalks, which have been closed to limit the spread of the virus, opened by Memorial Day, the start of the summer season on the Jersey Shore.
Social-distancing guidelines would still apply to any plan to open the beaches, Mr. Murphy said.
But on Friday morning, Mr. Murphy said he was encouraged by residents’ adherence to those rules when New Jersey reopened state and county parks.
“We had a good test run last weekend,” Mr. Murphy said on CNN.
New Jersey has the second-most coronavirus cases and deaths in the country, behind New York. More than 14,000 people in the state have tested positive in the past week.
N.Y.C. Health Department will not lead on virus tracing.
New York City will soon assemble more than 2,500 disease detectives to trace the contacts of every person who tests positive for the coronavirus, an approach seen as crucial to quelling the outbreak and paving the way to reopen the hobbled city.
But Mayor de Blasio said Friday that the effort would not be led by the city’s renowned Health Department, which for decades has conducted contact tracing for diseases like tuberculosis, H.I.V. and Ebola.
Instead, in a departure from current and past practice, the city is going to put the vast new public health apparatus in the hands of its public hospital system, Health and Hospitals.
In announcing the move Friday morning, the mayor said, “Everything at Health and Hospitals has been based on speed and intensity and precision, and they’ve done an amazing job.”
But the decision puzzled some current and former health officials.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett, a former city health commissioner under Mr. de Blasio who now direct the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, said the three key elements of handling the virus — testing, tracing and quarantine — had long been performed by the Health Department.
“These are core functions of public health agencies around the world, including New York City, which has decades of experience,” she said in an email.
Tell us about the moments that have brought you hope, strength, humor and relief.
The coronavirus outbreak has brought much of life in New York to a halt and there is no clear end in sight. But there are also moments that offer a sliver of strength, hope, humor or some other type of relief: a joke from a stranger on line at the supermarket; a favor from a friend down the block; a great meal ordered from a restaurant we want to survive; trivia night via Zoom with the bar down the street.
We’d like to hear about your moments, the ones that are helping you through these dark times. A reporter or editor may contact you. Your information will not be published without your consent.
Reporting was contributed by Maria Cramer, Michael Gold, J. David Goodman, Corey Kilgannon, Jeffery C. Mays, Andy Newman, Sarah Maslin Nir, William K. Rashbaum, Andrea Salcedo, Ashley Southall and Ali Watkins.
