New York City, one of the global epicenters of the coronavirus, is finally on track to reopen.
“Reopening in New York City is more complicated, as we know. But we are on track to meet all the metrics,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday, setting a reopening date of June 8.
New York City is the only region in the state that has not met all seven criteria to reopen. The city has a shortage of available hospital beds and contact tracers. Cuomo said that the city is expected to meet the final two criteria in the coming days.
“Remember, reopening does not mean we’re going back to the way things were,” Cuomo said. “It is reopening to a new normal. It’s a safer normal. People will be wearing masks. People will be socially distant.”
The city has been paralyzed since March. Private sector job losses in New York City totaled 885,000 in April, according to the state labor department, and the employment level in the city reached its lowest point since September 2010.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who joined Cuomo’s press briefing via video, said that roughly 200,000 to 400,000 New Yorkers would be returning to work when the city reopens next month.
When hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers start returning to work, ridership on the metro transit system will skyrocket. Though Cuomo has touted the state and city officials’ efforts to sanitize city buses and subways, it will be hard for New Yorkers to social distance on mass transit.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging employees who are returning to office spaces to stay away from mass transit systems whenever possible. The agency said employers should offer their workers incentives to avoid public transportation by covering the cost of parking so that people can drive to work.
De Blasio offered little guidance Friday when reporters asked him how New Yorkers would get to work, saying, “People are going to have to improvise, and I believe they will.”
There have been about 206,800 coronavirus cases in New York City, and at least 20,960 people have died, according to a case tracker from the New York Times. The outbreaks were worst in areas with the lowest median incomes, such as the South Bronx and southeast Queens.
President Trump said Friday that he will be “terminating” the U.S. relationship with the World Health Organization, saying that the WHO was taking directives from China early in the coronavirus pandemic.
“Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent, global public health needs,” Trump said from the Rose Garden.
Sen. Bob Casey announced Friday that he tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, meaning he likely had the virus months ago when he ran a low-grade fever and experienced mild flu-like symptoms. The Pennsylvania Democrat is the second senator to announce his antibody test results this week. Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine announced Thursday that he and his wife had also tested positive for coronavirus antibodies.
Though Casey and Kaine tested positive for the antibodies, they were never diagnosed with the virus. Rand Paul of Kentucky is the only senator to have been diagnosed with the disease. Casey said he would donate plasma, which has coronavirus antibodies, to help treat other coronavirus patients.
U.S. consumer spending, the main driver of the economy, tanked by a record 13.6% in April, eclipsing the previous record all-time decrease of 6.9% in March. Personal savings, however, increased 10.5% in April, which reflected stimulus payments from the federal government for $1,200 per person as well as a boost to unemployment benefit payments.
The Moscow health department has doubled the city’s official COVID-19 death count from 639 to 1,561 after Moscow-based reporters accused the government of undercounting fatalities. The health department said it had increased the count after performing postmortem examinations. The health department’s new methodology means the official death toll will increase across the country, the BBC reported.
Los Angeles County has received permission from the state to reopen barbershops, hair salons, and restaurants for in-person dining as early as this weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn said officials had created a safety plan for dining in restaurants, which includes showing owners how to arrange tables that are always 6 feet apart or proposes using barriers between tables if social distancing isn’t possible.
“This is a fine line that we’re walking in the county of Los Angeles,” Hahn said Friday. “We are threading the needle between keeping the public safe and allowing our economy to reopen.”
Norway and Denmark have snubbed their Scandinavian neighbor Sweden by opening borders to each other but not to Sweden, due to the country’s high COVID-19 infection rate. Sweden never instituted a nationwide lockdown to contain the outbreak and has a death rate per capita about 10 times higher than Norway’s and 4 times higher than Denmark’s, according to the Financial Times.
Prescriptions for the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine jumped almost 2,000% during the week in March when Trump promoted it to treat COVID-19. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that from March 15 to March 21, prescriptions for a 30-day supply of hydroxychloroquine surged 1,977%, from 2,208 to 45,858.
