Dispatch from City Hall, Good Friday, April 10. Evening.

What a week!

• Healthcare workers in the city plead for more PPE (Personal Protective Equipment)
  • We interviewed Sarah Dowd, a resident nurse at Harlem Hospital on Monday, April 6th. LISTEN HERE. 
• New Yorkers are starting to come to terms with the nature of this virus and the longevity of our recovery. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio And Governor Andrew Cuomo talk about an eventuality where testing, chasing positives, and providing places for quarantined people will be our new normal for the foreseeable future.  
• New Yorkers saw unclaimed bodies buried in mass graves on Hart Island, and the City responded. 
• We found out that the released death rate numbers are inaccurate, considering the amount of people who are dying at home has skyrocketed. 
  • Cuomo claims that there will be a new way of counting, however data does not seem to be being shared well between city and state. 
• Unemployment has been a grueling process for people out of work, but the State is setting something up with Google that might ease the strain on the system. 
• Still no talk of a plan to resolve rent for those who fall behind during the crisis, and their landlords. 

The Curve

On Thursday, the Mayor’s press conference provided a status report on COVID-19’s transmission and spread in New York City, or what is commonly referred to as ‘the curve’. It’s the most important view of the epidemic, and it guides the actions all levels of government take.

Has what we have been doing so far working? Where are we in the curve, and where is it projected to go? The Mayor gave the following answers:

• The epidemic can be divided into three stages: widespread transmission, Low-level transmission, and No Transmission. We are still in widespread transmission, so the measures we have put in place should not be relaxed.
• The Mayor expects to continue these measures through April and into May.
• We will have moved into low-level transmission when we have a) increased testing such that we can increase test availability, and b) when we can monitor successfully the number of active cases.  At that point, social distancing and PAUSE can reduce (not go away) and cases can be monitored and tracked.
  • Tracking cases is extremely important because once new cases are traced to a source, that source can be contained and the community can be protected. 
  • The Governor reiterated the importance of testing capacity, and again emphasized the role the federal government would have to play in order to get our testing capacity to the point where things start to open up again. Read a report on his full answers in City and State. 

For the first time this week, New Yorkers were confronted with the reality that this crisis won’t just end, but will gradually be phased out. The Mayor released this graphic to better visualize the hopeful descent of the virus in our city. 

The Numbers

• Previous dispatches have used New York City’s COVID-19 data as our source for the daily updates in deaths and new cases by borough.  This week, two stories raised questions about the reliability of that data.
  • A report filed by Gwynne Hogan of Gothamist showed that at-home deaths have been floating at 10x the normal rate, indicating possible unreported COVID-19 cases. 
    • The Mayor acknowledged that most of these are due to COVID-19, which could potentially raise the number of total dead by 70%.
  • A Politico report published today explains an increasing gap between the numbers the City and the State publish.
    • Two sources suggest the Governor is holding back numbers until he can announce them himself.
    • Mayor de Blasio’s spokesperson confirmed that the State is in possession of the data: “We are literally reliant on the state to give us our data because we don’t have it coming to us directly. So the state has to call the city every day. They have agreed to do that.”
• Main takeaways: the number of variables at play, and the long standing political divide between city and state, have resulted in an almost certain undercounting of the total dead in NYC, with the real number most likely double our current number. 

Racial and Ethnic Disparity

• This week was also the week where a breakdown of COVID-19 data by racial group was made available, which showed that black and hispanic New Yorkers were overrepresented. Read the full report in The City.

What we may be seeing here played out … is that cycle of those underlying drivers to poor health outcomes essentially on steroids because of the acuity of this virus.

Dr. Oxiris Barbot, Commissioner, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

• Mayor de Blasio committed to ongoing status updates on the ability of New York City to handle outreach to spanish-speaking New Yorkers, as well as the ability to expand our telehealth ability in multiple languages. Right now, the Mayor suggested our medical staff needed to be in the hospitals, until there was more bandwidth: “The ability of New Yorkers to call clinicians […] is predicated on continuing to see the relief so we can free up some of our clinicians to do that tele-health work and […] they don’t need to be in the hospitals. That was our first concern.”
• Next week, the Mayor has committed to report on the status of a ‘grassroots’ outreach capacity, relying on local clinics and leveraging their own, tightly managed, supplies of PPE.

PPE

• On Friday, Nurses set up a vigil to mourn their dead.
  • See the Vigil From Freedom News TV HERE.

Jails

• The Queens Eagle reported on the COVID-19 outbreak in the Queens Detention Center, a private jail in Queens near JFK. In two days, the number of positive cases grew from 2 to 16. Read more in the Queens Daily Eagle.

In Search of Funeral Directors

• Another area of New York infrastructure overwhelmed due to the virus: Governor Cuomo announced he’d be hiring more funeral directors, in order to administer and process the thousands of new dead. Read more in the Wall Street Journal.

Hospitals/ Quarantine Centers

• If we are flattening the curve, do we still need these new field hospitals & hotel hospitals? YES. Here is why, according to the Mayor and his team. 
  • The city is setting up field hospitals: Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Queens, Possibly Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. The City started making plans to build out a bunch of facilities in accordance with projections for the possible number of beds that would be needed, however deaths might be up but hospitalizations are down. 
    • On Friday, April 10th, the Mayor said: “Even last week – sadly last week for pretty much the whole week it looked like those projections were tragically on target. And then only in the last few days have we seen something very different.”
    • A little more info on the Van Cortlandt park hospital in The Bronx from the Riverdale Press HERE. 

• The Mayor spoke of a “new phase,” in which we could slowly start getting back to work and we had ample testing for the entire city. In this positive scenario, which some have said could happen as early as mid-may, these sites would be used to quarantine positive cases while they are sick. “As we move into that phase,” the Mayor said, “we’re going to need a lot more space for isolation and quarantine and these spaces would be perfect for that.”
• The city is already using hotels to provide housing for volunteer healthcare workers from around the country, for homeless persons who need isolation, and some people who have just come from Rikers. 
• Deanne Criswell, Commissioner of the NYC Emergency Management Department said to reporters: “Just so you know, for today we had just about 2,000 people in hotels, in isolation, in the categories that the Mayor mentioned and we still have capacity to use that space if the need does get any larger.”

Dead Bodies on Hart Island

• Drone footage of Hart Island appears to show a mass grave, which sparked a series of questions to the Mayor’s office. See the footage at the New York Times.
• In response, the Mayor published a tweet thread, saying that what the footage shows is the standard burial procedure for unclaimed bodies, which have increased due to COVID-19. 

Whenever we lose someone and there is a family member or a friend, here in New York or around the world, who wants to make burial arrangements, we hold remains until they are ready. Days, weeks, months—it doesn’t matter.

COVID-19 has not changed that.

— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) April 10, 2020

• In his press conference today, Mayor de Blasio reiterated that burials on Hart Island are unclaimed bodies, as they always have been, but also stated that if a body were to be retroactively claimed, the body would be returned to those that claim it. This is seemingly contradicted by the manner and process of the burials shown in the drone footage: coffins are stacked three deep, and no markings are shown to indicate specific plots. This opens up further questions.

Money, Rent, and Relief

• Mayor de Blasio calls for a need-based rent-freeze in rent-regulated units in the city.  
  • A rent freeze prevents rent increases; it does not suspend rent payment.
  • 1 million of the city’s 2.2 million rental units are rent regulated (from The New York Post). 
  • The Mayor passed this request to the Rent Guidelines Board, and there is no guarantee it will be implemented. Previous appeals to the State have been fruitless.
  • The tenants in Mayor de Blasio’s units (he is a landlord) are all still employed, and the Mayor has no plans to suspend their rent.
  • Read more in the New York Post.
• After an onslaught of unemployment applications overwhelmed the site, New York State Department of Labor announced a new web portal, launched in partnership with Google. Read more at Gothamist.
  • Here’s a report on how to use the new site, and what has changed, from The Democrat & Chronicle.
• The state unemployment hotline, according to this report in The City, completely melted down after a surge of applications over the past two weeks at 25x the normal rate.  

Food

• The Mayor and Council Speaker Corey Johnson use $25 Million for food pantries. 
  • “The City will provide $25 million in emergency funding to emergency food providers across New York City. This funding is being allocated as part of a new, ongoing partnership between the de Blasio Administration and the City Council to help emergency food providers deal with the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic.”
  • For food assistance visit this link HERE.
  • Or use this resource from Hunter College to find food pantries in your neighborhood. HERE

NYCHA PROBLEMS

• Yet another episode in the saga of public housing under COVID-19, this one reported by The City: elevators have gone out in 99 buildings, across 68 developments. 

How much is the City Spending on the Virus?

The Independent Budget Office released this page, cataloguing the ongoing spending of New York State and tracking the growing cost of COVID-19 response. Keep up to date at their dashboard here.

Resource Guide

• Coronavirus in NYC: Resources You Need to Know from The City
• Leveler.info

The Numbers*

	Friday 4/17, 1pm	Monday 4/20, 2:30pm
Total Cases	122148	132467
– Manhattan	15952	16987
– Brooklyn	32499	35203
– Queens	37447	40714
– The Bronx	27014	29505
– Staten Island	9166	9986
Hospitalization Rate	26.8%	26.2%
ICU Rate	??	??
Confirmed Deaths	7890(NYC) / 8893(NYS)	9101(NYC) / 10022(NYS)
Probable Deaths	4309	4582

This weekend: 1200+ deaths