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N.Y.C. may limit entry to parks to reduce crowds, mayor said.
New York City may limit entry to some parks to prevent them from becoming too crowded as the weather warms and adhering to social-distancing rules becomes more of challenge, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday.
At some parks, Mr. de Blasio said, “just the configuration of the park lends itself to overcrowding.”
“We can’t let that happen and we have to limit the number of people going in,” he said, adding that any such effort would require “experimentation.”
The mayor did not specify which parks could be affected, but he said more details would be announced on Friday.
“There’s not that many places, honestly,” Mr. de Blasio said. “But wherever that is the case we’re going to work with a protocol to do that.”
With playgrounds closed and gyms shut down as nonessential businesses amid the coronavirus outbreak, New Yorkers have flooded parks in search of safe places to exercise and enjoy the outdoors while maintaining social distance.
To help create more open space, the city has been closing some streets to car traffic. On Thursday, two more miles of streets were closed, bringing the total to nine miles. (Here’s a full list of which streets have been closed so far.)
Officials have said a total of 40 miles of streets would open to pedestrians and cyclists this month. There are plans to ultimately expand the program to 100 of the city’s 6,000 miles of streets.
N.Y.C.’s health department will not lead on virus tracing.
New York City will soon assemble an army of more than 1,000 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 the effort will 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, city officials said on Thursday.
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, city officials acknowledged after being approached by The New York Times about the changes.
The decision, which Mayor Bill de Blasio is preparing to announce as early as Friday, puzzled current and former health officials.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett, a former city health commissioner under Mr. de Blasio and now the director of 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,” Dr. Bassett said in an email. “To confront Covid-19, it makes sense to build on this expertise.”
Jimmy Glenn, bar owner and retired boxer, dies of the virus.
Jimmy Glenn, a former boxer, trainer and gym owner who spent decades running a popular Times Square dive bar where he was a beloved fixture and friend to many patrons, died early Thursday at a NYU Langone hospital in Manhattan. He was 89.
Mr. Glenn was hospitalized in mid-April after contracting the coronavirus and never recovered, his son Adam said. He had operated his bar, Jimmy’s Corner, on West 44th Street, since 1973.
In addition to being a boxer himself, Mr. Glenn worked as was a corner man and trainer of other fighters, including Muhammad Ali, at his now-shuttered Times Square Gym, on 42nd Street.
But it was his bar, plastered with boxing photos and other paraphernalia, that made him a friend to so many. Even as the surrounding area got less scruffy, Mr. Glenn’s saloon kept serving reasonably-priced drinks in a setting with just enough grit.
“Jimmy was an icon and a legend in #NYC, not because he was a giant in #boxing or because he owned an incredible pub, but because his heart was giving, pure and boundless,” the boxing promoter Lou DiBella wrote on Twitter. “There are literally COUNTLESS people that Jimmy touched who are grieving right now.”
In addition to his son Adam, Mr. Glenn is survived by six other children: Denise Mercado; Cheryl Mitchell; Delana Glenn; Anita Costa; James Glenn Jr.; Tanya Glenn; nine grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
JetBlue flyover of N.Y.C. gets a mixed response.
New York City’s nightly applause recognizing essential workers was accompanied on Thursday by something else: three JetBlue planes flying 2,000 feet overhead in honor of those fighting the coronavirus on the front lines.
As described in Twitter posts and graphics promoting the event, officials said the planes, each with a New York-themed logo on its tail, started from Kennedy Airport around 7 p.m. and followed a path over Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan before looping back.
Word of the flyover, the second such display in a little more than a week, had been met on social media with a mix of gratitude and scorn earlier in the day.
The critics included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx. She called the event as “a corporate PR campaign” that would burn “jet fuel at low altitudes over vulnerable communities dying from a respiratory virus.”
Other New Yorkers worried that the event was a gratuitous exercise that would entice people to gather outdoors to gawk at the planes, violate social-distancing rules and put themselves and others at risk.
Similar concerns were raised when fighter jets belonging to the Navy’s Blue Angels and the Air Force’s Thunderbirds squads flew over the city for the same purpose on April 28. Photos that circulated widely on social media after the event were cited by some people as evidence that the rules against crowds were being unevenly enforced.
JetBlue did not respond to a request for comment about whether it was concerned that the flyover might create a public health risk. In Twitter messages about the event, the company had urged people to “keep a healthy distance from others while watching” and even suggested that they take in the sight from their homes.
It was unclear how many people tried to see the planes, but at least some of those who did were underwhelmed by the experience.
Drug touted by Trump didn’t aid N.Y.C. patients, study says.
Hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that President Trump has promoted as potentially effective in fighting the coronavirus, neither helped nor harmed virus patients at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, researchers report.
As a result, the hospital is no longer recommending its use as a treatment for its virus patients.
The authors of the report, in The New England Journal of Medicine, said the drug should be used only in controlled clinical trials where patients were picked at random to get one treatment or another.
In the past several weeks, federal agencies and medical societies have issued safety warnings about hydroxychloroquine and a closely related drug, chloroquine.
Hydroxychloroquine is approved to treat malaria and the autoimmune diseases lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. But anecdotal reports from China and France early in the coronavirus pandemic suggested it might also help fight the virus. With no proven treatment, doctors around the world began to use it in a desperate bid to save dying patients. But there has been little evidence to support its use, and the French report was subsequently discredited.
The NewYork-Presbyterian study was not a controlled trial. It was based on the records of 1,376 patients admitted from March 7 to April 8, including 811 who got hydroxychloroquine.
At the start of the study, the researchers hypothesized that patients receiving the drug would be less likely than those not getting it to need a ventilator or to die. But they actually found no difference.
The findings are not the last word, they said: Randomized, controlled trials were still needed.
N.J. nursing home put residents in “immediate jeopardy,” a report says.
One patient at a troubled nursing home in northern New Jersey was found dead in bed, 12 hours after falling on a wet floor and suffering a head injury. Rigor mortis had set in. The patient had suffered from a high fever for days, but a doctor was never told.
Sick residents who were awaiting the results of coronavirus tests shared rooms with healthy residents. And thermometers used to take workers’ temperatures at the start of each shift did not work.
Those were among federal inspector’s findings last month at the nursing home, Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center II, the site of one of New Jersey’s largest virus outbreaks.
The report containing those findings, released on Thursday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, offered the first detailed glimpse into how the pandemic has ravaged nursing homes across the United States.
The inspection found that the privately owned Andover home had placed residents in “immediate jeopardy,” prompting the agency to issue a $220,000 fine. Its median fine over the past three years was $13,000.
Also on Thursday, National Guard members arrived to help at the 543-bed home, where the police found 17 bodies piled in a small morgue last month and where at least 53 residents have died since March after testing positive for the virus.
In a statement, Chaim Scheinbaum, the home’s manager, welcomed “the assistance from the New Jersey National Guard, as the state makes more resources available to help deal with the pandemic.”
The guard’s arrival, he added, would “free up medical staff to spend more time on patient care.”
New Jersey unemployment claims top 1 million.
New Jersey officials have received more than one million claims for unemployment benefits since March 15, when the state began shutting down its economy to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Murphy said on Thursday.
Since then, the state Labor Department has issued $1.9 billion in unemployment assistance.
“This is an unemployment crisis unlike that which we have ever seen,” Mr. Murphy said.
Robert Asaro-Angelo, the state’s labor commissioner, said his employees had fielded a stream of calls and emails from desperate residents seeking benefits and that 150,000 new claims had been filed each week since mid-March.
“To put this in perspective, the most new claims in a week after Super Storm Sandy were just 45,000,” he said.
Many people have complained about waiting hours to reach someone at the department or have reported delays in getting checks.
Mr. Asaro-Angelo said that some residents had filed the wrong information and he advised them to consult the state’s guidelines on filing claims.
Homeless people accept shelter offers as subway shuts down. Still, deaths mount.
On the first two nights of the city’s effort to steer homeless people off subway trains and into shelters or hospitals, more than half of those who were approached by outreach workers accepted the offer, Mr. de Blasio said on Thursday.
On Thursday, 218 of the 361 people who were approached went to shelters or hospitals, and on Wednesday, 139 of 252 did, he said. The subway now closes each night from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. so that trains can be emptied of passengers and cleaned and disinfected.
It had appeared recently that more homeless people were camping on mostly empty trains as the coronavirus swept through the city’s densely packed, dormitory-style shelters for single homeless adults.
As of Wednesday, 50 of the 71 homeless people who died of the virus had been staying in such shelters, the city social services agency said. Officials have said they were reducing the number of people in the shelters by moving them into otherwise empty hotels.
But advocates for homeless people remained concerned that the city’s shelters were unsafe, and they said that some homeless people who were kicked off the subway simply slept on buses, which continue to run all night.
Craig Hughes, a supervising social worker at the Urban Justice Center, said city workers should be offering masks and gloves to everyone they approach and giving blankets to people who do not go to shelters and were now deprived a subway car’s warmth. Nighttime temperatures in the 30s are expected this weekend.
Tanel Saar and Olga Malmon, a couple who said they had been homeless for about two years, said they refused help at the Union Street station in Brooklyn on the subway shutdown’s first night because they would have been placed in different shelters since they are not married.
They said that they had tried to go to a park after they left the train, but that the parks department had sealed it off.
Senators press Amazon on possible workplace retaliation.
Democratic senators are pressing Amazon about whether it was retaliating against whistle-blowers when it fired four workers, including one on Staten Island, who raised concerns about the virus’s spread at the company’s warehouses.
In a letter sent Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and eight colleagues asked Amazon whether it monitored unionizing efforts at its warehouses and tracked workers who participated in protests or spoke to reporters.
One of the four people fired after raising concerns was Christian Smalls, who organized a March protest at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island to demand stronger safety protocols.
Amazon subsequently fired Mr. Smalls. The company said he had not been let go for his role in the protest, but because he put other employees at risk by returning to work to lead the demonstration despite being on a paid 14-day quarantine after coming into contact with a person at the warehouse who was sick.
Last month, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, informed Amazon that her office was investigating whether it had violated federal worker-safety laws and New York’s whistle-blower protections by firing Mr. Smalls.
N.Y. health care workers have fewer virus antibodies than average people, study finds.
Health care workers in downstate New York who were tested for antibodies to the virus were less likely to test positive than the general population, Mr. Cuomo said on Thursday.
Antibody tests of 27,000 workers at 25 hospitals and other facilities found that 12 percent of the health care workers based in New York City had the antibodies, Mr. Cuomo said. Tests of customers at New York City supermarkets found rates of nearly 20 percent, the governor said.
In Westchester County, just north of the city, the results were similar: 14 percent of supermarket customers tested positive, compared with 7 percent of health care workers.
Mr. Cuomo attributed the findings to health care workers following protocols for using masks, gloves and sanitizer more closely than regular citizens.
“Those masks work,” Mr. Cuomo said. “If they’re working for front line workers, they’re going to work for people in their day-to day lives.”
On Long Island, health care workers and supermarket customers tested positive for antibodies at about the same rate, Mr. Cuomo said.
The governor said on Thursday that the virus had killed 231 more New Yorkers. The number has been fairly steady for four straight days.
N.Y.C. offers 140,000 free antibody tests.
New York City will offer 140,000 free antibody tests to residents who want to know whether they have been exposed to the virus, Mr. de Blasio said on Thursday.
The initiative followed the city’s offer last week of 140,000 antibody tests to health care and other front-line workers.
The new round of tests will be offered at sites in some of the neighborhoods that the virus has hit hardest: Morrisania in the Bronx, East New York in Brooklyn, Upper Manhattan, Long Island City in Queens, and Concord in Staten Island.
A phone number for making appointments will be released on Friday, the mayor said. Preference will be given to people who live in the affected neighborhoods.
Cuomo extends moratorium on evictions.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday that he would extend the moratorium on evictions another 60 days, until August 20, and that the state would bar landlords from charging late fees on rent that was not paid during the virus crisis.
Mr. Cuomo also said that tenants would be allowed to use security deposits in lieu of a month’s rent.
“I hope it gives families a deep breath,” he said of the measures.
Mr. de Blasio, who had pushing for the security-deposit measure, praised the move.
In March, Mr. Cuomo barred landlords from evicting tenants through June 20 for any reason.
On the front lines: Abby Fazio, pharmacy owner.
The Times is regularly profiling essential workers in the New York region during the pandemic.
Where do you live? Manhasset, Long Island, N.Y.
Where do you work: New London Pharmacy, Chelsea, Manhattan.
How has your job changed during the outbreak?
I’ve been working seven days, because there’s just not enough staff. Just now, I was putting items away, which is not what I do as a pharmacist. But when you’re an owner, you do whatever you have to do to keep the business going.
How has your staff been?
Five or six haven’t come back to work since the beginning of this. And a few weeks ago, it was even harder because three of my main people — two pharmacists and my lead technician were out sick with Covid.
How did that change things?
We started closing at 6 rather than 8:30. Because there was just not enough time at night to sanitize and to get the store ready for the next day. And to, you know, do all the bits and ends that you have to do as a pharmacy.
In your job, you’re talking to patients about what the illness is like, and you’re interacting with people so much. Does that give you any anxiety or stress?
Not anymore. Because, like, in the beginning, we didn’t know enough. But I’m still a pharmacist. I still have to help you. I still have to show you where and what a thing is, and I have to listen to how you feel. When you take an oath in pharmacy, it’s like, you owe the public a certain thing. And I felt, that’s what I’m doing. And that has humbled me.
Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Maria Cramer, Michael Gold, Denise Grady, Jeffery C. Mays, Andy Newman, Azi Paybarah, Sarah Maslin Nir, Matt Stevens and Nikita Stewart.
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