De Blasio admits NYC doesn’t have backup plan if public schools close By Julia Marsh March 15, 2020 | 11:00am | Updated (And this dumbcluck demorrhoid thought he should be President of the USA. Someone sh**t him and put the rest of us out of our misery.)
Mayor de Blasio admitted that the city doesn’t have an immediate backup plan if he closes the city’s public schools amidst the coronavirus outbreak.
“A variety of contingencies are being set up. They are far from perfect,” de Blasio said on CNN Sunday morning after a growing number of teachers, local elected officials and parents called for the closure.
“The difference between a functioning school system for over 1 million kids versus creating alternative centers for feeding or for the kids of health care workers, that kind of thing, if we got to that point we would improvise anything and everything,” de Blasio said.
“But it will not be by any means as good by definition as what we do every day when we have a functioning school system. But those contingencies are being built as we speak,” he said.
The plans are not complete even though de Blasio began to hold tabletop exercises with emergency management officials in January.
As of Sunday morning, the mayor wasn’t ready to make the call to shut down the school system.
"My blunt fear is if the schools shut down they will be done for the year, done for the school year maybe even for the calendar year. So I’m very reticent to shut down schools,” de Blasio said.
Among his reasons for keeping schools open are the fact that poor kids who get their meals at schools, health care providers and first responders need a place to send their children, and unsupervised teens create health and safety concerns.
“If we can keep our schools going we will. If at any point we feel it doesn’t make sense we’ll make a move,” he said.
A source told The Post top city officials met to discuss the issue Saturday night and may reach a decision Sunday to close the schools.
New Yorkers should assume they’ve been exposed to coronavirus: officials By Lee Brown and Julia Marsh March 15, 2020 | 10:21am | Updated (If this is true, there's no sense in locking down the city. Folks should just carry on with business as usual... and keep their hands clean.)
New York officials have effectively stopped trying to trace COVID-19 cases — saying everyone should assume they have already come into contact with the potentially deadly virus, according to an alarming report.
Diplomats in the city were given the startling warning in a briefing Saturday afternoon by a team of New York officials led by commissioner Penny Abeywardena in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, according to a read-out of the call seen by Foreign Policy.
They stated that the virus is likely so wide-spread that tracing the number of infections is redundant — while warning that the city could be hurt until at least late fall, according to the report.
“Everyone in New York should assume that they have been in contact with COVID 19,” a read-out at the conference call said, according to Foreign Policy.
“Interviews with confirmed cases and contact tracing is not a good use of our resources when the virus is widespread,” they admitted, according to the report.
“There will be little emphasis on tracing.”
The city officials — also including members of NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — warned diplomates that the Big Apple is “in the mitigation phase of the outbreak,” according to the report.
“This means that all individuals should assume that they have had some contact with the virus and practice maximum-possible social distancing; most cases will be mild and medical care should only be sought in urgent, worsening, or vulnerable cases,” the officials warned, according to the read-out.
“Testing is now less important — the danger of transmission is much higher as many people have now been exposed and the majority of people will only have mild symptoms,” they warned, according to Foreign Policy.
The authorities could only say they were “hopeful that exposure to COVID will make people immune,” conceding it was “too early to say definitely.”
But they offered no assurance that the city would provide special services to foreign diplomats exposed to the virus in New York, including tests.
Diplomats told Foreign Policy that they welcomed the city’s candor — while also saying they felt that not enough was being done to help.
New York officials also said that it was unlikely they would notify foreign delegations if one of their nationals tested positive, citing the importance of maintaining patient privacy.
One senior diplomat told Foreign Policy that the tone was, “It’s your responsibility not to get infected, and your responsibility to stay home if you do. Your odds of not dying are rather great — if you get close ‘give us a call.’”
Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted the growing spread — but dampened down the claim that everyone should assume they have been in contact.
“I don’t think we can say that,” Hizzoner told CNN Sunday.
“But we can say because of community spread it is clearly widespread already in New York City and will continue to grow.”
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