Bill de Blasio NYC COVID-19 Briefing Transcript April 16

Mayor Bill de Blasio: (00:00)
The map. We hoped this day would never come, but it has. Thank God those reserves were carefully built. They will now help us get through. If ever there was a time to draw on reserves, it’s now. And on top of all the challenges brought to us by the Coronavirus directly that are part of why we have to draw on those reserves, there’s yet another challenge. What we’ve seen already in cuts from the state of New York, $ 800 million already and we obviously are watching carefully because we have to be ready for what the future brings in terms of the state budget.

Now, the one way that you can get out of this without causing immense human pain and setting back our recovery. The one way is to get the kind of direct federal aid that we deserve. No New Yorker, no New Yorker is responsible for this horrible crisis, but New York has borne the brunt. We have been the epicenter. When you look at the impact here, anybody with a heart would recognize that the federal government has to come to the rescue. We lead the nation’s economy. We’re the biggest city in the country. We constantly send resources out to the rest of the country year after year. There are so many reasons why it’s clear, but just humanly, this is the reason that should matter the most because people are suffering because no Americans should have to go through what New York is going through and the federal government should be there for us.

I remind you, federal government was very quick to bail out the banks a decade ago. No questions asked. Federal government was very quick to bail out the auto industry. How about bailing out the nation’s largest city? How about bailing out the epicenter of this crisis where people have been suffering? That is what our federal government should do. For every reason, morally, practically as any question of fairness, as any question of how we move forward and we’re still waiting. Now, what we’re going through is what other cities are more and more going through. Other states are going through. We’re not alone. They haven’t seen the help they deserve either. There’s been $2. 2 trillion in stimulus funding so far. 2.2 trillion of which only 1.4 billion has been in direct aid to New York City.

To give you a comparison, we got 1.4 billion and we are the epicenter of the crisis, 8.6 million people, the airline industry got 58 billion. So corporate bailouts, huge, but a bailout for the place that needs it most has been minimal. I want to be very clear. The leadership that we have seen and I want to commend Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi, I spoke to both of them yesterday. I want to commend them for the work they’re doing because they have led the way in pushing for all the elements of the stimulus that were needed, not just for cities and states, but for everyday people. Those checks are going out to help working people. So much of that came from the leadership of Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer.

We know where the roadblock has been consistently. Senator McConnell, the Majority Leader of the Senate has stood in the way of so many of the things needed. He has to hear our plea. He has to understand what it means for human beings. That he’s not allowing the kind of aid to flow that we need. But it’s also clearly time for President Trump to speak up. I spoke to the president yesterday, I let him know what’s happening in his hometown. I let him know that we’re experiencing a huge budget problem and I said to him in the clearest terms, if we don’t have any more resources, how can we provide for the safety, the protection, the health of New Yorkers? And I was clear with him and the Vice President that the only way to recovery is if New York City and all our cities are able to come back strong and if they can function, if they can’t function, there is no recovery.

So, right now there is an opportunity right this minute. Literally negotiations are going on in Washington on what’s being called stimulus 3.5. There’s another even bigger stimulus package up ahead, number four later apparently in May. But right now, there are negotiations going on on stimulus 3.5 with a focus on small business and paycheck protection and obviously our small businesses have gone through hell and only the federal government can help them in the way that’s needed. Working people need to know that their livelihoods will be preserved. That piece of this stimulus 3.5 is crucial, there’s a discussion right now, proposal of two point, excuse me, of 250 billion. 250 billion for small business and for working people through paycheck protection. There’s 100 billion on the table for hospitals and healthcare workers crucially needed here and many other places. And 150 billion and I think it should be at least 150 billion. I know the governors, to our credit, the nation’s governors bipartisan consensus are calling for even more and we need more.

But right now even to begin a discussion of 150 billion in aid directly to localities and states. But I have got to be clear, that formula must be based on need. It must be based on what localities and states have actually experienced with COVID-19. Not just some generic distribution for political purposes, but actually addressing the needs of this city, this state, what people have gone through. If we were talking about a hurricane, we were talking about natural disaster, you wouldn’t put money in for the entire nation equally if the natural disaster happened in one place. This is a different reality because this disaster of COVID has happened in many places, but thank God there are some parts of our nation have had very little impact. Some parts have had moderate impact and then a place like New York that’s borne the brunt, that’s been the epicenter.

This funding must reflect that reality. It’s just common sense. It’s about helping people and about helping us back on our feet. So I made clear to the president his hometown needs him. And I’ve had this conversation with them before. All New Yorkers, 8.6 million are watching the White House right now to see if the president will lead. Will the president speak up? If the president of the United States speaks up, let’s be clear. If president Trump raises his voice, the Republican Senate will follow period. Haven’t heard his voice yet. I want to give him an opportunity to do the right thing. So president Trump, here’s my appeal to you. Help us back on our feet. Tell Mitch McConnell that we need stimulus 3.5 and we need aid directly to New York City, directly to New York State. So we can keep providing the help that people need. Keep them healthy, keep them safe. If you lead, the Senate will follow. If you are silent, they will not. It’s on you, Mr. President.

It’s true for every city and every state in America as well. So, anyone who wants that national recovery, better take care of the places that have to build that recovery. And that’s why we need this stimulus 3.5 and it could be agreed to today, literally, today. And passed by the Senate by unanimous consent and that’s what we need.

Now, that is a very broad summary of what we are presenting today in the budget. The details have been posted publicly now. Showing you how we made the difficult cuts we had to make, the specific programs and initiatives we had to cut back in this time of crisis. Some of them, thank God, many of them will be able to hopefully restore one day in better times. But so much of it is also about just the reality. A lot of what we’re doing just can’t happen now. Any expenditure that was related to people gathering as part of their normal year, there are no gatherings. So there’s a lot you’ll see in these cuts that were obvious. A lot that were difficult of course. All that were necessary so that we could keep the resources for those basics I described.

So the facts, the details are now public. How we got to the specific numbers that now dictate this budget. The toughest part will be ahead and that will all be about what happens in Washington and we have time thank God to see Washington decide if they’re going to act or not. If they’re going to save New York City and America cities or not. We have time between now and June for those decisions to be made and they better be made right. And that will dictate everything else we have to do. So that is a very broad overview of the budget. I want to talk about a few couple, a few other areas and then we will turn to questions from the media.

So, right now as we fight this battle against the Coronavirus, we’re learning every day more and more about it, more and more about the reality. And one of the things we’ve talked about in the last week or two is we’re seeing some real disparities in how this horrible disease is affecting our city. We’re seeing some places hit particularly hard. We’re seeing lower income communities hit particularly hard. We’re seeing communities where people have not gotten enough healthcare historically hit hard. Communities of color hit very hard. Immigrant communities hit hard. So, we’re making additional adjustments to our approach and one of them is to increase the number of free hotel rooms available for isolation and quarantine.

Right now, 11,000 hotel rooms are being readied for this new effort. And this will be focused on people who need a place because of the reality of their living circumstances. For example, there are many people in multigenerational homes, particularly in lower income communities that just don’t have a lot of space and if there is a threat that someone might get infected in the home and it might spread amongst the members of that family, we have to guard against that. So, we are making sure that people in those multigenerational homes many of them are overcrowded homes, will have a place to go. If a member of a family for example, is symptomatic or if a member of family is high risk, we will have a hotel room that will allow them to isolate from other members of the family.

This is something that’s going to help us protect people and slow the spread further. We’ll work with community health centers and all of our public hospitals and clinics to identify who needs this particular support. This will begin this coming Wednesday and we will move those who need that help to those hotel rooms. We’re also continuing to make sure the hotel rooms are available for all healthcare workers. I want to emphasize this, whether they work in public hospitals, whether they work in any of the other types of voluntary hospitals, independent hospitals. Any healthcare worker who needs a place to stay while they’re doing their work, who needs to be isolated from their family for fear of spreading the disease to their family and obviously these incredibly heroic healthcare workers are exposing themselves every day to that potential risk and a lot of them do not want to take the risk of bringing it home to their families. Those hotel rooms will be available regardless of which hospital. There’s 56 hospitals in this fight. Regardless of which one you work at, they will be available to you if that’s what you choose. And obviously as we discussed a few days ago, making more rooms available for homeless individuals who are in shelter settings where we need to create more space. Wherever it’s not possible to have the space that we need, we’re going to use hotel rooms as the better option. This is made more possible by the fact that we see the reality with Coronavirus somewhat differently affecting us somewhat differently today than it was a week or two ago. We are far from out of the woods. But bluntly at this point, I had expected a number of these hotels to already have been converted to field hospitals. Our projections told us we might have to use a vast number of hotels, dozens and dozens to be able to accommodate all the medical needs.

So far, thank God that has not been the case and we will not let our guard down. We will always be vigilant. We are never ruling out that this disease might throw us another curve ball, but because there are more hotel rooms now available, we’re going to turn them to these uses more and more to keep people safe.

Another area where there’s been a lot of concern and understandably so, has been about our jail system. Keeping everyone safe, the people who work there, our corrections officers and all the other folks who work there. The inmates as well. There’s been a real humanitarian concern. Well, what we’ve been devoted to from the beginning is reducing that jail population in whatever way we appropriately could, whatever way was fair and humanitarian, but also always kept public safety in mind. So, at the beginning of March there were 5,447 inmates in our jail system and that it bears remembering was already less than half the number compared to the day I took office when we had over 11,000 inmates. So beginning of March, 5,447. Three weeks ago we announced that we had gotten under 5,000 inmates and yesterday another historic milestone, jail population is now under 4,000 inmates. That is the lowest in 74 year. You have to go back to 1946, the year after world war two ended to have had so few people in our jail system and again for under 4,000 people, compared to a city of 8.6 million.

So, thank God we were able to find a way to do that the right way and that means there are many fewer people in the space that remains, more ability to socially distance within the jails, more ability to ensure that people need isolation and quarantine, they can get it. And this is how we’re going to protect the health of everyone involved and with of course, the extraordinary efforts of our correctional health system, part of health and hospitals and I thank everyone at correctional health, they don’t get a lot of attention. They don’t get a lot of kudos, but I want to thank everyone in correctional health who’s been making sure that everyone in our jail system, employees and inmates are safe. And again to all of our correction officers and everyone that works in our correction system, we know how tough your work is. And it’s been really tough in this period, but you’ve stuck to it and you’ve all worked together to keep people safe. And we really appreciate that deeply.

Now, we’re at the point where each day I tell you about the indicators to tell us how we’re doing. And I think you’re going to see again that we should never underestimate this disease. We’re hoping for sustained progress. We believe these indicators are the truest indicators to tell us where we stand and where we’re going and how to approach it. But these indicators tell us a tough truth some days about the fact it won’t be easy. It won’t necessarily be fast, it won’t be all in a straight line. So, we believe this is the truth. And New Yorkers always want the blunt truth and it tells us we’ve got a lot more work to do. But it’s also a reminder that the progress we have made is all because of you and stick to it with those social distancing standards and with shelter in place, stick to it because we’re going to need it.

So, in terms of the daily number of people admitted to hospitals for suspected COVID-19, unfortunately that number went up. And again, these are based on numbers from two days ago that have been verified, went up from 370 to 386. Daily number of people in ICUs across our health and hospital system for suspected COVID-19 went up 868 to 887. The percentage of people that tested positive went up from 53% to 55%. And our public health labs testing the number who tested positive went up from 76% to 78%. So this was a tough day. This is not what we’re looking for, but we know we’re going to do this stage by stage, step-by-step. We’ll get there and it just reminds us we have to stick to it.

So, before I conclude with a few words in Spanish, I’ll just say, everything we’ve tried to do over years and years is about making people’s lives better and bringing more fairness to this city. Now it is about that for sure, but it’s really about four things. Four basic things. Your health, your safety, food on your table, a roof over your head. That’s what we are going to make sure all New Yorkers have. Whatever else happens, that’s what we’re going to focus on. Not even a pandemic can stop us from protecting New Yorkers and that’s what we’re going to do. Quickly in Spanish, [foreign language 00:19:31]

[foreign language 00:00:07].

With that, we will turn to our colleagues in the media. As always, please give me the name and the outlet of each journalist.

Speaker 2: (20:17)
Just a quick reminder for folks that we have Budget Director, Melanie Hartzog, First Deputy Mayor, Dean Fuleigan, and Dr. Barbot on the line as well. And our first question is Andrew at NBC New York. Andrew?

Andrew: (20:29)
Yes. Good morning there. How are you?

Good morning, Andrew. How you doing?

Andrew: (20:33)
Good. I wanted to ask, this is the second day this week that you’ve described as a tough day with the metrics not going in the right direction. I wonder, was the governor premature to say the worst is over? And secondarily, is it contradictory for the mandatory masks to be in place now that we’ve flattened the curve? Is that not a mixed message for New Yorkers?

No. Good questions, Andrew. But no. First of all, I think these numbers that were given out that we … I want to emphasize, we believe these are the true numbers, meaning these are the numbers that tell you the most. There are many things. It’s all about human beings. And I always keep coming back to it, this is about human beings and their lives. But the numbers tell us something. And we set up this kind of rigorous standard so there’d be no overconfidence. This is a disease to take very seriously. I’m stating the obvious. This is disease that has thrown us curve balls before, can throw us curve balls again. So we set up what we thought was a really smart, careful way to measure where we’re going. So we never took our foot off the gas prematurely.

Requiring face coverings, we put out that guidance on face coverings as soon as we saw evidence that that would help protect people. And yesterday I said we required it for city workers who came in contact with the public and I was glad that the governor acted additionally. In fact, this is exactly the time to double down. This is exactly the time to take the standards we created and make sure we’re applying them very intensely, very disciplined manner. Because we got to get out of this and we’re not going to get out of it easily. We have to get out of it through hard work. It’s no fun, but we have to do it. I do think when you say something like the worst is over, there’s a truth to that in terms of what we thought was going to happen, for sure. I told you that. Remember that line of demarcation Sunday, April 5th? We thought that next week was going to be so much worse than it turned out to be. It was still horrible. We still lost a huge number of our fellow New Yorkers, but we thought it was going many times worse. So we definitely averted, at that point, what we thought was going to be something much worse. We can’t entirely say where we’re going.

But I’ll tell you something, I keep coming back to this. We know that some places took the foot off the gas and paid the price. We know, and I said this to the president and the vice president yesterday, I said it very squarely, I said, “I know you want to restart the economy, so do we. But the worst possible scenario is take your foot off the gas prematurely, the disease has a resurgence. Then everything you were doing to try and restart, you have to stop, you have to go backwards, you have to add more restrictions, you have to slow down the timeline further. And you’re going to end up waiting a long, long time before you can get people back to normal. The way to get back to normal is with careful, patient, smart actions to work our way through those phases we’ve discussed to the point that we can have something like normal life again.”

So no, I think the face coverings is smart. Keep using them, everyone. We really need to do this. And if we are smart and disciplined, then the worst definitely will be behind us. But we really have to make sure that happens.

Speaker 2: (24:07)
Jeff Mays from the New York Times is up next. Jeff?

Jeff Mays: (24:12)
Hi, Mr. Mayor. Good morning. I’m wondering if you have a projection on how much federal aid you need to continue balancing the budget. And secondly, IBO has called for a slightly larger budget deficit, I believe. It’s close to $10 billion. How do you reconcile those differences? Are you cutting enough in order to stabilize the city’s finances?

Well, I respect the IBO a lot, Independent Budget Office, they do good work. I mean, it’s not the first time, to say the least, we’ve had different projections. And we stand by ours. We think ours are careful and cautious always, our OMB projections. If you said to me, “Is there a chance that this revenue loss could grow?” Of course there is and I’m very, very worried about that. It could grow by a little, it could grow by a lot. It could grow by billions, even. But right now, this is based on the facts as we know it. And obviously, it will all be connected to how and when the economy restarts.

We need the federal government to make up all lost revenue, period. Period. Think about this model for a moment. We can’t achieve new revenue in any coherent fashion at this point. We can only get revenue from the federal government. State government’s in no position to give us revenue. The federal government’s done over 2 trillion already, of course they can make up our budget gap. Right now, if that lost revenue stands at 7.5 billion, of course they can make that up. Again, if they had $58 billion for the airline industry, I assure you, they can find 7.5 billion for the nation’s largest city. It’s not even close. Of course they can do it.

I also think that the FEMA aid, which we deeply appreciate and FEMA has been a fantastic partner, but right now, we have to do 25% reimbursement. I mean 25%, I should say, of the costs we have to cover. That shouldn’t be in the middle of a pandemic. The federal government should cover all those costs. So right there to me is the immediate issue, what the federal government should cover. And then the exceptional, anything that’s exceptional related to COVID-19. It’s a pandemic. It’s international. It’s the responsibility of the federal government. And we’re fighting this fight here. There are so many cities and states that there could be no way they can afford to protect people unless there’s federal aid. So Jeff, it’s as simple as that. The federal government should cover all lost revenue for cities and states, should cover all COVID-19 related new costs, should make sure cities and states are whole and can get back on their feet. That’s in everyone’s interest.

Speaker 2: (27:10)
Todd from amNewYork is up next. Todd?

Todd: (27:14)
Morning, Mr. Mayor. I hope your family’s doing well.

Thank you, Todd. I hope the same for yours.

Todd: (27:20)
Yes. Anyway, my question’s in regard to the release of Rikers Island prisoners because of COVID-19. Commissioner Shea said yesterday he was very concerned that some were committing bank robberies, intimidating witnesses, one who set fire to the door of a witness. Your unions, [inaudible 00:07:55], and parole are very concerned as to who’s monitoring the mostly convicted felons. We spoke to parole Department of Corrections. Your Office of Criminal Justice had no answers. With all due respect, maybe you can answer just, not for me, but for your commissioner and your unions, what’s going on here?

Todd, I appreciate the question. You and I have known each other a long time. I want to contest you and say I do not believe they had no answers so I want to make sure we connect you to the right people because I’ve heard the answers directly from them. So with all due respect, I know they have answers. There is a clear monitoring program that’s been set up for anyone released. This is something that a supervised release structure existed already. It’s being utilized in this case. There are a number of measures that have been put in place to make sure that people are monitored, including, in some cases, using electronic monitoring. Our team can get you those details. The NYPD Corrections Department, our Office of Criminal Justice all work together on this. We’ve been talking constantly to the district attorneys in the state on this plan and they’ve obviously approved releases as well.

This was about making sure that anyone with a profound health danger was not put in harm’s way and making sure that those who could be released were released to keep everyone else safe in that jail system. I’m concerned too. Anytime we release someone, we have to make sure we work to keep everyone as safe as possible. But we had a real imperative about saving lives. That came first. But the fact is we’re going to keep doing whatever it takes to monitor these individuals. And then as soon as the crisis is over, the way the releases occurred, if anyone needs to be brought back to jail, they will be. So for example, someone who was awaiting trial and there were no trials, this is a country by our constitution where there’s supposed to be a speedy trial. These are folks accused of a crime, have not yet gone through their trial. If we deemed it appropriate to let them out in this crisis but then the system comes back to normal and they are going to be awaiting trial again, we bring them back to jail awaiting trial. So that’s how the process will work going forward.

Speaker 2: (30:06)
Julia from the Post is up next. Julia?

Julia: (30:10)
Hi, Mr. Mayor. How are you?

Good, Julia. How you doing?

Julia: (30:13)
Good. I see in your budget that all outdoor pools will be closed for the summer. And I understand that City Hall has told the Parks Department to prepare for every scenario including the possibility that beaches will be closed for the season. Yesterday you talked about not being able to envision Yankee Stadium opening until later in the trajectory. So at this point, how likely is it that beaches will remain closed all season? And give New Yorkers a sense for what will summer in the city look like?

So Julia, a very good question. On the question of the beaches, which I think we have to parallel to the pools, it’s a little different, of course, because someone can walk along the beach even if the beach is not open. But right now, I don’t see a scenario anytime soon where we could … Imagine Coney Island in the middle of summer. Hundreds of thousands of people. I’ve been on Coney Island, on that beach many times. Hundreds of thousands of people packed tightly together. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. So then, obviously, you could have a situation where people can go to the beach to walk along the beach, but not in large numbers anytime soon. We still have to observe social distancing. I know people are doing that now, but the notion of having lifeguards and people coming to the beach like normal, we don’t have that in our sights yet.

I think it’s going to be tough to project. Right now, I’d say lower expectations. Just for everyone’s sanity, lower expectations. We’re at a point right now, the middle of April, where we’re practicing intense social distancing. Everyone’s being very careful to only go outside as much as they need to and just to get basics and get back inside. To go from that to mass gatherings of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, that’s a big jump. And that jump should only happen when we’re sure is not going to exacerbate the disease. Because again, the worst of all worlds would be to see a resurgence.

So I need to see those indicators start to move to even talk about some loosening of restrictions and they have not been moving yet. So I would say every one of us would love to have our summer or some part of our summer, but keep expectations low for now. Let’s not have any false moves, let’s not jump the gun. Let’s make sure we get it right. The things that would have required spending money now to get ready for the summer, we’re just not doing because we don’t have yet a clear roadmap to how we get to those summer activities. So right now, cautious approach focused on beating back this disease. That’s where we’re at.

Speaker 2: (33:10)
Yoav from the city is up next. Yoav?

Yoav: (33:14)
Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to ask about the 11,000 new hotel rooms, particularly when it comes to the families who are living in overcrowded houses, etc. What prompted this move now, I guess? Were you seeing a lot of transmission among family members? Were some of the people trying to isolate in places like hospitals? So what were you seeing that made this seem like a necessity? And I guess why wasn’t something like this implemented sooner?

Thank you. Yoav, I mentioned it but I’ll emphasize it. First of all, even though these last six weeks or so have played out in a way that feels more like months or years, it’s been just rapid, constant changes and shocking developments in the course of six weeks that we’ve all been trying to make sense of. But I go back to that warning I gave about Sunday, April 5th, which again, seems like a long time ago. It was 11 days ago. On Sunday, April 5th, even as that day dawned, I thought the likelihood was a horrendous week that week ahead. And we got into that week and things got a little bit better for a few days. And I didn’t know if a sort of a false dawn or something real. But proved to sustain and we’ve had a better situation since that Sunday than we expected. But still plenty of challenges, plenty of pain, plenty of things to deal with.

Since that day, we’ve gotten to think a little bit differently. And in those 10 or 11 days, we went from thinking every hotel room, and I want you to hear the word every, every hotel room was going to be converted to hospital space. Obviously, there’ll be some for dormitories for healthcare workers. But otherwise, it was hospital, hospital, hospital. The projections we made when we talked about having to add 60,000 hospital beds, that was going to be a massive use of hotels. And we were trying to build it rapidly on top of Javits Center and the Comfort and the Queens Tennis Center, all the things that were happening.

In recent days, we’ve had more and more assurance that we didn’t need all those hotel rooms and we’ve been starting to use them more and more for other purposes. Talked a few days ago about using the opportunity to take those hotel rooms and get more and more people out of shelter. But now, this piece we’re talking about today correlates with what we learned about disparity over the last week or more. And the fact that the disparity dynamic seems to also connect to the multi-generational families and the crowded households. And you see that particularly in some lower income communities, particularly in immigrant communities. So we’re trying to come up with another targeted strategy, just like the targeted testing that we’ll be starting as early as tomorrow. The targeted focus on the families that are really crowded together, well, we want to make sure if someone’s in danger that we can give them an alternative.

So it’s all been coming out of our experience, but most especially the fact that we built a strategy, and the state did as well to their credit, that was all about saving lives and saving hospitals so we could save lives and having hospital beds, having personnel, having ventilators, having supplies to save lives. Luckily, we’ve been able to move a little bit off that strategy and do some other things now with those rooms so we can protect people a different way.

Speaker 2: (37:07)
Henry from Bloomberg is up next. Henry?

Henry: (37:11)
Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you doing?

Good, Henry. How about you?

Henry: (37:14)
I’m okay. I’m trying to understand how the budget was balanced in the absence of a budget book. We don’t really see a balancing of … We don’t see the arithmetic. So you’re saying we’ve lost 7.4 or we will lose $7.4 billion in revenue. You’re cutting the budget by 6 billion compared to January. Where is the arithmetic that balances more than $13 billion?

We will get you, I know some has been put out, we’ll make sure that more has been put out. We’re obviously in a very different situation than our normal budget process. And today’s presentation certainly reflects that. But we will, there’ll be plenty of detail filled in. But here, let me give you the basics I think speak to your question. So remember we had the, crisis hit in the fiscal year we’re in right now, fiscal year ’20, obviously starting in March. And we had to address the impact on this fiscal year and on next year. For six years, as we’ve had these discussions, we were pretty much always looking at the fiscal year ahead. And the year we were in was balanced and we were going to send money forward. That’s been the tradition. We’re in a very different situation here because the crisis hit immediately and it’s undermined this year’s budget as well as next year.

So what we are dealing with now, that revenue loss that has been projected throughout the calendar year. And of course, the $800 million we lost from the state. The gaps we had to close for this fiscal year currently, $2.5 billion. For next fiscal year, $6.2 billion. So grand total of about $8.7 billion. How we did it. Again, $2 billion in the PEG program. We originally talked about $1.3. We added that. It got up to over $2 billion. Another $700 million or so in other types of savings, debt service savings, and others. The reserves, we’re drawing down about $4 billion on the reserves. And then over the two fiscal years, there’s about $2 billion in various types of federal aid accounted for from the previous stimulus-

…packages and also from FEMA aid directly. But again, reminding you that right now we’re required on any expense that’s FEMA eligible, we’re required to pay 25% of it. And I think that’s a horrible mistake in the middle of a pandemic. And we should not have to pay for FEMA eligible expenses. The federal government should cover those, but we have budgeted on the assumption that we’re still having to pay that 25%.

So Henry, that is the way the math comes together. Obviously this is profoundly different than what we were expecting just weeks ago when we had the preliminary budget. And it’s kind of like thinking about the time in February when the preliminary budget was presented, seems like again, another century. That was projected to be over $95 billion. This budget is $89 billion. We are literally $6 billion less in what we were planning on spending than just as recently as February. So that’s the basic layout. But we’ll make sure we get you all appropriate charts and all and take questions going forward on those.

Speaker 3: (41:27)
Juliet from 1010 WINS is up next. Juliet.

Juliet: (41:31)
Yes. Hi, good morning Mr Mayor. How are you?

Good, Juliet, how you feel?

Juliet: (41:36)
I’m, okay, thank you. So my question is this, I called 311 this morning to inquire about the process of the food program and the delivery program. So I have to tell you what happened. I was on hold for 10 minutes and I did time that and then when I did get through to somebody who was very nice, I was told that they couldn’t process anything or register me or whoever would call and I would have to call back at 11 o’clock because the system wasn’t available. So how can people get through if they need? And specifically seniors who really probably rely on their phones more than going to a computer to look something up or register. What can people do?

Juliet, I’m glad you did that. I appreciate it. I’m very frustrated by the report you’re giving me. I have a lot of respect for the folks in my team who’ve been fighting this battle and a lot of respect for the good people at 311. And I visited with them a few weeks ago and really, really appreciate their work, but I have been saying to my team incessantly, we have to make sure that people get served immediately and we need quality control on 311. And bluntly, you just proved what I’ve warned people about that no one should have to go through what you went through.

I understand sometimes there’s a surge in demand and we in fact yesterday emphasize to all New Yorkers that food would be available for anyone who needed that delivery because they were vulnerable or a senior couldn’t get out, a disabled person. We made that very clear yesterday, so it does not surprise me, Juliet, there’d be a spike in the number of calls after I told all New Yorkers this food is therefore you, no matter what we’re going to feed you. And maybe the system, maybe they did not put enough personnel on to address that spike. I don’t like that, but at least I can understand that, but it is not acceptable to me and I’m going to deal with it right after this press conference.

It’s not acceptable to anyone who would be put on hold for 10 minutes for anything in the middle of a crisis. It’s not acceptable that people be told to call back later. It’s just not the way we’re supposed to do things. So I’m going to be really honestly pissed off at the people who are supposed to be handling this who I have warned repeatedly to not let this happen and we will fix it today. I’ll just order more personnel. This is exactly the kind of thing that I’m making a priority. We will spend whatever the hell it takes and get as many personnel as is needed to ensure that doesn’t happen.

And you’re totally right, Juliet, that seniors are much more likely to use the phone. I mean we can give out the website till the cows come home, but in the end most seniors are going to pick up the phone. And a lot of people don’t speak English and they need to have the translation too when they call. So I will get this fixed today and I want you to test it again tomorrow please and call in and I’ll turn to our colleagues and say when you call in to give your report, I want to make sure that call gets through so I can see if people have made the changes they need to make.

Speaker 3: (44:44)
Marcia from CBS New York is up next. Marcia.

Marcia: (44:48)
Good morning, Mr Mayor, how are you doing today?

Good Marcia, how are you?

Marcia: (44:52)
Good. My question today is about relaxing the standards for social distancing. President Trump has said today that he’s going to announce new guidelines for relaxing social distancing and for reopening the economy. I wonder two parts, when you spoke to the President and Vice President yesterday, if you discussed this issue, and what your views are about how that would apply to New York City, which is clearly the epicenter.

Yeah and in fact Marcia, I always am careful not to characterize in detail what other people said to me in a private conversation. I want to give them that respect. I will be very broad in characterizing their view. I’ll tell you what I said though. I told them it would be madness to rush the restart in a way that would cause a boomerang effect where the disease reasserted. We got set back even farther the day when the economy could reopen got pushed back much worse, much farther because they moved too soon.

I had conversation with the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, last night and she talked about, she had been studying the history of 1918, the Spanish influenza epidemic and how in San Francisco they had a false dawn in 1918 where they thought it was going away and everyone came out and started doing big gatherings again. They literally ha a big city celebration that the flu was over and everyone came flocking to the celebration and days later there was a massive outbreak and it got worse than ever and put off much longer any recovery. Now that was a hundred years ago, different situation. But it’s a cautionary tale, Marcia.

So I told the President and Vice President, it would be a huge mistake to restart too early. It would be a huge mistake to take our foot off the gas and to start taking away the things that actually were working before we were sure that we had turned the corner. Now I do think they… I’ll let them speak for themselves. I think they do think New York’s in a particular situation, to some extent that’s true. But my warning was don’t see New York City as so unusual that you think the same thing we’ve gone through isn’t going to happen in one form or another in a lot of places. The social distancing was necessary. The shelter in place was necessary and you have to come out of it carefully and smartly or you’ll regret it.

So my answer is, we’ve got these indicators Marcia, these three indicators are going to tell us a lot. We have to be smart. We have to be cautious. I think if the President artificially, if you will, ignores the warnings we’re getting on this disease and rushes to do a restart that ignores the danger. He will regret it. I hear he has one chance. I think the President has one chance to get it right. If he is smart about it and careful about it, we can actually get to a restart of the economy we can sustain. If he jumps too soon, it’ll be horrible. It’ll set us back further and everyone is going to judge him by how he makes that decision, rightfully so. And that’s the decision I have to make from my city too and I’m going to be damn careful in making that decision.

Speaker 3: (48:19)
Kathleen from Patch is up next. Kathleen.

Speaker 4: (48:23)
We just lost her.

Speaker 3: (48:24)
Oh nevermind. Rima from Chalkbeat is up next. Rima can you hear us okay? Rima?

Rima: (48:34)
Yeah, Can you hear me?

Speaker 3: (48:35)
Yes we can. Can you hear me?

Yes Rima.

Speaker 3: (48:37)
Okay, great.

Rima: (48:38)
Hey Mr. Mayor, how you doing?

Good. How are you?

Rima: (48:41)
Good, good. I wanted to ask you about just a couple of things here. First of all, is there going to be summer school for kids who are behind as well as the enrichment programs that are available to kids for extra classes? And also, unless I’m missing something, we see a lot of [inaudible 00:49:01] and school-based cuts here, but I don’t see much at all on the central level or cuts to capital projects and I’m wondering why there’s not more cuts there so they don’t fall on programs.

So Rima a combination of points I’d make, definitely on the capital side a lot is being delayed. Things we want to do and believe in we obviously, I’m someone who started the initiative and I believe in deeply to put air conditioning in all our classrooms, but things like that just inherently have to wait compared to food, shelter, safety, health. There are things that have to wait, but the capital spending, it will happen eventually, but a lot of it’s going to be delayed. In terms of central costs, administrative costs, we’ve been making cuts to that already in previous savings plans that continues. The summer issue, we can’t plan on summer right now. That’s the simplest way to say it. Our schools are closed for this school year. The things that we would normally plan for the summer, we cannot guarantee. We only, at this point I think, can truly plan on the reopening of schools in the beginning of September. That’s where our energy is going, actually start the schools up right coming out of this horrible crisis, really amplify the academic side but also address all the other challenges including the mental health challenges that the whole school community is going to go through.

In the meantime, the focus on online learning, the focus on mental health needs of kids and families now. But summer’s a giant question mark so we are not announcing anything for the summer at this point. The chancellor said they’re planning all sorts of scenarios including online scenarios for the summer, but we don’t have any assurance yet that we can do anything in person this summer in school buildings. And we’re going to look at every option and then as we get some actual proof of where we’re going, we’re going to decide. But again, I’d say watching those three indicators, that’s going to say a lot about whether we even get to think about summer programming in some form going forward.

Speaker 3: (51:34)
Anna from the Daily News is up next. Anna.

Anna: (51:37)
Hey Mr Mayor. Happy budget day.

I guess you could call it happy but I don’t know if it is so happy. Go ahead Anna.

Anna: (51:46)
My favorite day of the year. So just back to the beaches issue, I think a lot of people are interpreting your comments a few moments ago that the beaches are likely to be closed. And I just have a logistical question about that. Given the issues with enforcement of social distancing and the limited workforce, how can the city guarantee people won’t go to beaches, especially since even before the summer season starts, a lot of people still go and there have been drownings because no lifeguards are on duty. How do you guys protect against that issue?

So what you said is an important beginning. There’s a whole lot of the year where beaches… We do not have lifeguards. We do not permit swimming and there’s signs to warn people and there’s all sorts of messages telling people it’s not safe. And thank God the vast, vast majority of people honor that Anna. But a few people don’t and so many times it’s young people and it’s very, very sad. And we have lost some young people because they went and they went swimming someplace where it wasn’t safe and there wasn’t a lifeguard on duty. And that’s been true unfortunately for years. And all we can do is keep telling people it’s not the right thing to do for their safety and keep telling families that and hope that people understand. That’s what we deal with every year.

But in terms of the summer, until we have a much, much better sense of where that’s going, I don’t want to create a situation where people start gathering. So if we bring out lifeguards and it’s a situation where people think it’s safe to go to the beach and it’s safe to start resuming normalcy, it’s going to endanger people based on what we know now. So no. Right now we do not have a plan to open the beaches. Just like we don’t have a plan to open the pools. People, you’re absolutely right, someone could go right now and walk on a beach and if they do it while practicing social distancing, okay. But right now I don’t want to create a situation where people think they can go back to something like normal and be beachgoers this summer. I don’t like saying that, but it’s just a blunt truth. It’s not safe. If things evolve, we’ll assess our options going forward, but I can’t project it now because it wouldn’t be safe to project it now.

Speaker 3: (54:15)
Erin from POLITICO is up next. Erin.

Erin: (54:19)
Hi Mr. Mayor. Quick follow up on the budget and then I have a question about the hotel program. On the budget, did you end up requesting any authority to borrow a for operating expenses? And then with regards to the hotels, can you just go through what are the criteria to qualify one of these and it just as a lay person, it seems like most of our apartments are too small to not transmit the disease in close quarters. So what threshold you actually have to meet to be able to go to one of these?

We’ll get the specifics out, Erin. The idea is to address where the dangers are greatest. So we already are seeing it. You’ve seen the maps. We understand there are some neighborhoods that are bearing the brunt of this disease. So if we combine the notion of, we know where some of the most challenged places are and where people are in danger, and we know people in multigenerational homes in crowded conditions are in particular danger within those neighborhoods, that’s where we’re going to focus. Overwhelmingly that means lower income folks. I think you’re right. Many, many New Yorkers deal with a much more crowded situations than most of the country. But for lower income folks, it can mean doubling up, tripling up all sorts of things that folks with a little more money, tend to not experience. So we’re going to really focus on those in greatest needs and those who are most threatened and that will be the priority in terms of these hotel rooms.

In terms of borrowing, we have not yet activated, or work to activate, a new borrowing capacity. It’s certainly a conversation we will have going forward. The possibility of doing some kind of longterm borrowing that is fiscally smart. That’s under the kind of terms that would be fair and smart. For an example from the past, a 20 year repayment timeline for example. But right now we have not yet acted on that.

Speaker 3: (56:33)
Brigid from WNYC is up next. Brigid.

Brigid: (56:35)
Good morning Mr Mayor. Two questions, one related to the budget. Can you talk a little bit more about the decision to dip into the reserves and whether you feel like the current plan goes far enough in terms of longterm planning for some of the challenges you envision ahead? And then separately, a question related to healthcare workers. I’m wondering if the city has an estimate of how many healthcare workers and hospital employees have died at city and public hospitals. And are you tracking that information? Will you be releasing that?

Yes we do. And of course it’s a very painful topic because these are folks who worked heroically to save lives and put their own lives in danger. We have information. I don’t get every daily report on what’s been released publicly and what hasn’t. But that certainly needs to be released and we will. But my heart goes out to their families because these are people who did something very, very heroic.

On the reserves and the longterm planning, the decision to use the reserves was to get us through this moment, understanding that the discussion on what would be the right thing to do, the federal support, given the nature of this pandemic and the fact that we’re the epicenter. That discussion was happening now in April and would happened in May, but our budget would be determined finally in June. So this was to get us through. We’re going to fight hard to get that stimulus funding we deserve and that’s the big X factor here.

In terms of longterm planning, right now obviously the immediate focus is on saving lives, protecting people, all those basics I talked about and then figuring out the right way, the responsible way to restart our economy. We will be doing more and more longterm planning as we go along in this process. But our urgent consideration with this executive budget was to make sure we could address the immediate needs of New Yorkers, keep our budget intact and build a foundation for the future. But we’ll have much more to say on the longterm going forward.

Speaker 3: (59:04)
Sydney from the Advance is up next. Sydney.

Sydney: (59:09)
Mr Mayor, how are you doing? Why did you decide to move forward with a reduction in overnight service of the Staten Island Ferry in the executive budget? And what do you think reduction in overnight services is going to look like through 2021? Do you have an idea of which hours will be affected?

We’ll get you details, Sydney. Look, I very much believe we have to keep consistency in Staten Island Ferry service. People depend on it. It’s a lifeline for Staten Islanders. We will do that. What we found, of course, was a massive drop in ridership in the midst of this crisis. I mean, it’s truly massive. They were running boats with very few people on them, so we’re trying to just create a consistent schedule that will be the one people can depend on going forward. And I don’t think we can yet say through 2021 at all.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: (01:00:03)
I don’t think we can yet say through 2021 at all on anything. My hope is that we’re able to do something better before 2021 if we can handle this disease properly and only restart when we’re ready. It’s conceivable for sure to start bringing some things back to normal piece by piece carefully. So I don’t want to project anything about 2021 right now, but what we’re trying to do here is just say here’s a baseline people can depend on this makes sense given very, very low ridership right now. And then we’ll figure out the future as we start to see the healthcare situation change.

Speaker 5: (01:00:46)
Gloria from New York one is up next. Gloria?

Gloria: (01:00:49)
Thank you Mr. Mayor. Bridget sort of got to my question but if I could ask a follow up and just for a point of clarity, did I hear you say you were asking for 7.5 billion from the federal government and what are you doing if you don’t get a response from the government, if you don’t get the exact amount that you are asking for and looking at what you’ve proposed so far, I realized that there’s an immediate crisis and [inaudible 01:01:25] what it deals with those immediate crisis, but what about the impact this will happen on the following year and how much planning is your budget team doing now to balance some of that. You haven’t made [inaudible 01:01:45] any kind of cuts since [inaudible 01:01:46] office, like as it’s the first [inaudible 01:01:48].

Gloria, I gotcha, I gotcha. The stimulus should be for us New York City, the epicenter of the crisis for New York state, for all cities and states affected it should be the amount of lost revenue due to the Coronavirus that lost revenue should be replaced dollar for dollar by the federal government. Federal government can do it, again, 2.2 trillion so far that they have put into various stimulus programs, only 1.4 billion directly to the city of New York to address this crisis in the epicenter. Clearly they can make up that 7.4 billion that we have now projected as our loss revenue. If that grows, they should fill that gap further. There’s a three stimulus, 3.5 no, there’s another one coming in May. They will have in each one the opportunity to keep making cities and states whole and it should be done according to need according to the impact of the coronavirus.

Also, the FEMA aid should not be 75% federal, 25% local cost. It should be 100% federal because of the nature of what we’re dealing with. If they want a recovery, and I believe the president does, I believe everyone does. They really want a recovery. They really want to restart the economy, make that choice to make us whole and help everyone move forward. So that’s what I’m saying to them. In terms of planning, yes, of course. This is what OMB does all the time and pandemic or not, they keep doing it. These choices were to address the immediate situation. The cuts that were made were very substantial and very necessary and very unfortunate.

The reserves, this was time to use the reserves and thank God we have built them up over the last six years, but there are many, many tough choices ahead. It will all depend on what Washington does. They do the right thing. We’ll still have tough choices to make, but we’ll be able to get through and protect all those basic services I talked about if they do the wrong thing. It’s going to be a very, very tough scenario, but we’re planning for all eventualities and then we’re planning of course years ahead. That’s what OMB has to do and does do.

Speaker 5: (01:04:14)
Leslie from The Wall Street Journal is up next. Leslie?

Leslie: (01:04:18)
Hi, thank you. Are you planning any furloughs or layoffs for city employees?

Leslie I would call that the last resort and again, I think honestly that decision rests in Washington. There’s just no way to make up for this level of lost revenue, which has happened almost overnight because of a global crisis, we’ve never seen the likes of in history and Washington has to step in so we can provide basic services. And I said this to the president and vice president, I said this to Speaker Pelosi, I said this to Senator Schumer. It’s this simple for New York City to be able to provide basic services to our people and participate in the recovery. We must have that stimulus money or else we’re going to have to make horrible choices going forward. So those kinds of choices are absolutely the last resort.

Speaker 5: (01:05:21)
Gersh, from Streetsblog is up next. Gersh?

Gersh: (01:05:27)
Mr. Mayor?

Hey Gersh.

Gersh: (01:05:27)
Hello?

How are you doing?

Gersh: (01:05:30)
Can you hear me?

Yes Gersh. How are you doing?

Gersh: (01:05:33)
Sorry. I’m good. You said earlier the things that might have been a priority cannot be a priority right now, but you also said that a budget is a statement of values. Now, all of the cuts are not yet online, but some are. If you cut, for example, your placard corruption team or you cut your better buses initiative or you cut millions to divisions of your programs. Are you saying that these kinds of programs are not currently a priority even though two days ago you said you will create a plan for the car reduction that many New Yorkers will want?

Clearly, let’s go over it again. The most basic things are health, safety, food, shelter. So we’re going to focus their first. The question you asked a few days ago is a great one. As we move forward into a recovery, how do we have a recovery that moves us forward beyond where we were before? I agree with that entirely and I’ve said very clearly the recovery must include profound changes to address a host of injustices and we’ve seen it deeply with these healthcare disparities. We have to address injustices, we have to create a more fair society coming back and we have to address the huge crisis of the future, which is still global warming and that means getting people out of their cars that we will address in the recovery plans.

But right now with the choices we’re facing, it goes right back to those basics and it is a statement of values to say we’re going to make sure people have, a roof over their head food to eat, that they’re safe, that their healthcare is protected. That’s where we’re putting our focus now. There’s no question that a lot of the other things you mentioned are very important. That’s why we put them in the budget to begin with and they will continue as we have more resources in the future. But we got to focus on the basics now.

Speaker 5: (01:07:32)
Last two, Kevin from the Brooklyn Paper. Kevin?

Kevin: (01:07:36)
Hi Mr. Mayor, can you hear me?

Yes, Kevin.

Kevin: (01:07:40)
My question is about the testing sites, Brooklyn community board six which overlaps with your former city council district and park slope. Essentially a letter yesterday saying that the drive through testing centers aren’t cutting it for the majority of New Yorkers. Given that the majority of New Yorkers don’t own a car. I know the city is looking to open a new center in East New York and I think the state is opening one in Brownsville. Can you talk a little bit about the status of these new centers for people that don’t have a car and what the city is doing to make it at least equally as accessible to get tested for coronavirus if you don’t have a car.

Yeah, Kevin, look, the testing situation has to change profoundly and this is one of the biggest saddest stories of this whole history of the Coronavirus. From January on we were demanding that the federal government give us the right to do local testing and that took a long time and then they put huge restrictions on it. Then we were demanding the actual tests and that took a long time and we still aren’t anywhere near the amount of testing we need and it’ll be a long time till we get there. I did announce a few days ago, a major breakthrough that we found a way to get some test kits that we can purchase from the open market and others that we’re going to create right here in New York City. And that’s really exciting in the beginning of May, but even that will be only a piece of what we need.

So I think the way to think about is there’s been very limited testing. The focus to date has been on patients whose lives needed to be saved though the testing was crucial to saving their lives, healthcare workers, first responders. And now in recent days we’re starting to expand it. And again, we’ll have sites up starting tomorrow. Some of the sites I talked about in some of the most hard-hit communities, that is the next piece we are trying to build out. But it still requires us to have the test kits, the PPEs, which had been tough to come by and the medical personnel that we can apply to testing. And that situation’s a little better, but there’s still challenges for sure. Over time, we want to get to a situation. We have really widespread testing available and that’s part of how we get to that low-level transmission phase we’re talking about and onto effectively zero transmission, but we don’t have all that in hand yet we got to keep building that.

So the notion of people saying, “Hey, I just want to make it really easy to get testing in my own community.” I get that 100% why people feel that we got to do something more strategic than that. We got to figure out how to get a lot more testing, apply at where it’s needed most and then build toward the day where we use it as a strategic tool to actually contain this disease, to focus it on people who are symptomatic, to focus it on people who we need to determine should not go to work. People who can go to work again to focus it on who needs to be quarantined and to make those quarantine spaces available in large number. That’s the next phase.

That all has to be tightly organized and prioritized. So a lot more to say on that as testing supplies start to increase, but I want people to think about this is strategic. This is about how we end this crisis. Not so much just you go someplace and you get a test that tells you at one point in time how you’re doing. I understand why people want that, but we’ve got to do something more strategic for everyone to get out of this crisis.

Speaker 5: (01:11:13)
Mark [inaudible 01:11:14] from CNN. Mark?

Mark: (01:11:15)
Hey everybod, how you doing today?

Hey Mark, how you doing?

Mark: (01:11:22)
Good, good. So I had a couple of questions on a couple of different topics. The first was it’s about the probable cases. What if anything can or is the city doing to check up on or help the people that say maybe haven’t tested positive for COVID but have gone back home and need help there or maybe in fact even die at home. And the other question I have is about the DOE and about how reporting is happening now amongst administrators and teachers and principals-

Mark I’m going to cut you off. Just Mark, go back on your first question. I want to make sure I understood it. Could you just restate your first question?

Kevin: (01:12:05)
Right. It’s about the probable cases. What can the city do about them? So let’s say you have just somebody who’s at home who ends up dying at home and they get their bodies get picked up or services end up coming too late. What can the city do to help them to sort of prevent them from being casualties of COVID?

And then what was your DOE question?

Kevin: (01:12:33)
What’s being done about the reporting of DOE? Like as far as administrators, are they reporting positive numbers of COVID cases, to the city, to the health department? Is that being done in a timely manner?

Okay. On the second piece, I mean we’ll definitely have the department of education follow up with you, Mark. I’m going to look. Right now because essentially, very, very few of our employees are going to a school building except for the folks who are doing the food programs and the very small number of enrichment centers for the kids of essential workers. To the extent we pray, no more DOE employee suffer, but if anyone does. That’s going to the health department most likely directly. But we’ll get you an update on that and obviously everything we can do to try and protect, the people that do such important work we will do. On the folks, it’s such a horrible scenario that there have been people who died at home. It’s something that existed in the past, but obviously nowhere near on the level we’ve seen it with the Coronavirus.

But I think what we want to do and is part of this intensive effort to communicate again to people including what appears to be a certain number of people who, even though there’s been constant communication, still need more and we want to get it to them, that huge campaign we talked about advertising, TV, radio, print, digital, the community health outreach, the texting and calling campaigns that we’re putting in place hopefully eventually healthcare workers out in communities talking to people. I think a lot of this is people who don’t have access to information as much through mainstream media. A lot of people who don’t speak English, we’ve got to get more information out to make sure that anyone who needs healthcare knows it’s always available to them.

And we’re going to do that followup with telemedicine more so people can speak to a clinician live whenever they have questions. They need anything, multiple languages we have that, but we’re expanding that as part of the plan. So I think it’s going to just be more outreach to help anyone know if they fear for their lives, if they think they’re in danger, we will get help to them. Unquestionably. We have to make sure they know it is there for them no matter what.

Speaker 5: (01:14:48)
Last question goes to Jose from Univision. Jose?

Jose: (01:14:52)
Hi there. Can you hear me?

Yes, Jose.

Jose: (01:14:55)
Oh fantastic. So Mr. Mayor, thank you for doing these daily press briefings, they’re very helpful. My question is about this paper from an economist at MIT came out earlier this week and it assert that New York city’s subway system was a major disseminator. If not the principal transmission vehicle of the coronavirus infection in the city. So what I want to know is if your office has taken a look at this paper, I don’t know if I would call it a study, but it’s definitely a paper and what your office makes of those assertions and if you can, whether the city has tried to come to its own conclusions?

Appreciate the question. My healthcare team looked at it. I think you’re right, it is not appear to be… I haven’t seen it myself. So I’m working from their summary. It doesn’t appear to be a full blown study. It appears to be sort of an effort to look at some broad data and draw some initial conclusions. I think the part that is evident is, this is why early on we said to people, you don’t need to go on the subway, don’t if you can work from home, work from home, if you can walk or bike or anything else, do so. Because there was a concern to start clearing out the subway to the maximum extent possible while recognizing that we also depended on the subway to get essential workers to do the lifesaving work they do. So we had a challenge from the beginning, but I think what is fair to say is I haven’t seen it, but my sense is it sort of is broad in telling us that any place people gather is a place of concern.

There’s no question about that. And there’s been obviously efforts now since the beginning of this crisis to have less and less, fewer, fewer people on the subway, less and less crowding on any place, including subways. And we’ll keep that going I think for a substantial period of time. Okay everyone just wanted to say this is a very unusual day. It’s not like any other day that I’ve ever experienced. Now only as mayor but my life before that in public service. Never seen a day like this where we’re announcing an executive budget against the backdrop of a global pandemic and with so many challenges and so many question marks.

But what’s clear at least is we know where to help has to come from. It has to come from Washington and it really has to, or else we’re left with horrible, horrible choices. But what we will do, no matter what, no matter what, is protect New Yorkers health, protect your safety. Make sure there’s food on your table, make sure there’s a roof over your head. That’s what we will do. No matter what is thrown at us and anyone who needs that help. It’s there for you. A budget is a statement of values. Our values are clear. We’re here to protect people and we will do so and we will get through this crisis. It will not be easy, but we will get through this crisis. Thank you very much everyone. God bless you all.

Bill de Blasio NYC COVID-19 Briefing Transcript April 16

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