The governor reported that 226 more people died of the coronavirus in New York, the state’s lowest one-day total in five weeks.
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Schools in New Jersey will stay closed for the rest of the academic year, Gov. Philip D. Murphy said.
As deaths fall, Governor Cuomo outlines rubric for reopening.
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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday provided new details on how New York’s reopening would proceed as the coronavirus continued to decline in the state.
He suggested that regions would be responsible for dictating their own reopenings, according to guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control that the state has adapted.
“Regions can start to reopen and do their own analysis, but these are the facts that they have to have in place to do it,” he said.
Proceeding from those guidelines, he said that he would not allow those regions to reopen unless they were averaging no more than 15 new hospitalizations or five deaths from the virus per day.
“If upstate has to wait for downstate to be ready, they’re going to be waiting a long time,” he said.
The governor said that after a previously discussed first phase in which construction and manufacturing would reopen, three more groups of business reopen in turn.
A second phase would include professional services, retail, and real estate, a third would include restaurants and hotels, and a fourth phase would include businesses catering to the arts and to entertainment.
He said that 226 more people in New York State had died of the coronavirus — the lowest one-day figure since March 28 and down more than 70 percent from early April, when nearly 800 people per day were dying of the virus.
Mr. Cuomo said that the number of hospitalized virus patients and the number newly admitted to hospitals also continued to fall, albeit much more gradually than they increased as the outbreak exploded across the state.
“The decline from the mountain is not as steep as the incline,” he said.
Mr. Cuomo also spoke about plans to reopen the state gradually, starting in places where the virus has all but disappeared.
N.J. schools will stay closed until the end of the academic year.
All public and private schools in New Jersey will remain closed for the rest of the academic year, Gov. Philip D. Murphy announced on Twitter on Monday, a week after saying there was “a chance” they would reopen.
“I had hoped that we could get back to a sense of normal by allowing our children to get back to the schools they love and to be with their friends and classmates,” the governor said at his daily briefing, following the announcement. “But the reality is that we can not safely reopen our schools.”
Students will continue online-only instruction through the end of the school year, Mr. Murphy said.
“Guided by safety and science, this is the best course of action,” he said on Twitter.
The governor’s decision follows similar steps taken by neighboring New York and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Murphy had repeatedly indicated a preference for schools to reopen — a position that President Trump shared, but the majority of his fellow governors did not.
“There is a chance that we could get back in school,” he said last Monday on CNBC, hours before laying out benchmarks the state will need to meet before businesses can reopen.
“I’m a father of four kids, one of whom is in high school,” he said on April 16, “and I want him to return to his regular classrooms. But I can’t do that right now. But I remain hopeful we can.”
A violent encounter in N.Y.C. prompts concerns about unequal policing of social distancing.
New York City’s public advocate, Jumaane D. Williams, said he didn’t know the specifics.
But the pictures he posted on Sunday — of swarms of mostly white New Yorkers sitting undisturbed in parks, and of what appeared to show combative encounters between the police and brown-skinned New Yorkers — told a story that many found alarming over the weekend.
While the balmy weather flushed millions of New Yorkers out of doors, prompting Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Cuomo to warn against shirking social distancing restrictions, Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea said that the police wrote only about 70 summonses for violating social distancing rules over the weekend.
When those rules were enforced most harshly, the police appeared to be cracking down on nonwhite New Yorkers.
One of the pictures posted by Mr. Williams was a still from video footage captured on Saturday that appeared to show an officer violently escalating a confrontation that police said began as an attempt to enforce social distancing rules.
The police officer in the video, Francis X. Garcia, is shown pointing a stun gun at bystanders before punching and slapping one man to the ground.
The man, one of three people arrested during the encounter, was charged with assaulting a police officer.
Commissioner Shea said that Officer Garcia was stripped of his gun and badge and placed on modified duty while the Internal Affairs Bureau investigated the encounter, which happened on Avenue D in the East Village in Manhattan.
“Certainly some tactics that I was not happy with,” Mr. Shea said on NY1 Monday morning. He said that a Taser that did not belong to the police, $3,000 in cash and a small amount of marijuana were recovered at the scene.
Mr. de Blasio wrote on Twitter Sunday night that he was “really disturbed” by the video and added, “The behavior I saw in that video is simply not acceptable.”
The video of the encounter prompted more questions about whether the department was unevenly enforcing social distancing rules, an issue that had flared up the previous week after the mayor personally oversaw the dispersal of a crowd of mourners at the funeral of a Hasidic rabbi in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Mr. de Blasio was asked Sunday about unequal enforcement but did not comment directly.
“What we see in some places is a large number of people in a small area and our job is to make sure they practice social distancing,” he said.
Commissioner Shea said Monday that “in a few areas there was probably too many people out” over the weekend. He added, “This is a great experiment we’re living through here. Really never seen this before in a city of 8.6 million people trying to keep everyone inside.”
Speaking of the police’s encounters with the public over the weekend, he said, “Overall it went well, but I think that this is something that you’re going to see a lot of adjustments made, as we go forward in terms of doing everything possible to keep people as far apart as possible.”
Two homeless men were found dead on the subway.
Two men, both believed to be homeless, were found dead on subway trains over the weekend in separate instances, according to the police. The causes of their deaths have not yet been determined.
The first man, 56, was found on Friday evening, “slouched over and unconscious” by passengers on a C train at 168th Street in Manhattan, the police said.
The police said there were no signs of trauma on the man, whose name was not released.
The second man was found on Saturday morning in a subway car in Brooklyn, police said. No further details were provided.
One man tested negative for the coronavirus, while the test for the other was pending, the city said.
The deaths come as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the police and the city authorities struggle to remove homeless people from the trains, where they have sought refuge from shelters infested with the virus. Starting this Wednesday, the normally-round-the-clock subway system will close for four hours every night for disinfection.
A spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio, Freddi Goldstein, wrote on Twitter of the two men, “Our outreach teams were engaging these individuals but they had not yet agreed to come into shelter. Closing the subway nightly will help.”
Kenneth Lovett, a senior adviser at the M.T.A., called the deaths “heartbreaking” and said that the agency was cooperating with the police investigation.
“We have repeatedly said the subways are no replacement for shelter and if these two individuals were indeed homeless, as suspected, it’s clear more needs to be done by the city to ensure all New Yorkers have access to needed shelter and services,” Mr. Lovett said.
The city will give out 7.5 million masks to New Yorkers.
The city will distribute 7.5 million free face masks to New Yorkers in the coming weeks, expanding a program that began over the weekend, Mayor de Blasio said on Monday.
The masks — 5 million three-ply surgical-style face coverings and another 2.5 million nonmedical cloth masks — will be available at parks, schools and food distribution centers.
“Wherever you turn, you’re going to be offered a face covering,” Mr. de Blasio said.
The surge of supplies comes during a week when Mr. de Blasio said that the city was adequately supplied with personal protective equipment for its hospitals for the first time since the crisis began.
“We cannot rest on those laurels,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We know we going keep protecting our heroes.”
The mayor said that more protective gear was also being shipped to the city’s nursing homes, which have already received 10 million pieces of P.PE. since March he said.
This week’s shipment including nearly 2 million surgical masks, about 170,000 face shields, over 750,000 pairs of gloves, 15,000 coveralls and aprons and 10,000 shoe coverings.
Mr. de Blasio also used his briefing to object to statements from two White House economic advisers, Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett, suggesting that there were no immediate plans for another stimulus measure that would give federal funding to cities and states.
The mayor asked of President Trump, “Why doesn’t he take a stand and tell his advisers to shut up?”
He again implored Mr. Trump to speak up in support of such a measure.
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Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Christina Goldbaum, Andy Newman, Sarah Maslin Nir, Sharon Otterman, Azi Paybarah, Ashley Southall, Nikita Stewart and Tracey Tully.
