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Coronavirus Updates: As Income Disparity Of Infections Becomes More Clear, De Blasio Calls For Rent Relief
By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Apr 10, 2020
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Gretchen Robinette / Gothamist
By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Apr 10, 2020
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This is our daily update of breaking COVID-19 news for Friday, April 10th, 2020. Previous daily updates can be found here, and up-to-date statistics are here.
Read our guide to understanding New York on PAUSE, NY's stay-at-home order; a look at preparing for the spread of coronavirus is here, and if you have lingering questions about the virus, here is our regularly updated coronavirus FAQ. Here are some local and state hotlines for more information: NYC: 311; NY State Hotline: 888-364-3065; NJ State Hotline: 800-222-1222.
Are you a healthcare worker or another kind of essential worker? Email us what you're seeing at [email protected].
3:30 p.m. Mayor de Blasio called on the state to allow tenants to apply their security deposits toward their monthly rent to address the financial hardships created by the coronavirus crisis.
"If a tenant has no money, he has no money," he said, during a press conference on Friday.
Earlier in the day, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed an order that allowed tenants who paid a security deposit equal to more than one month's rent to apply all or part of that money toward their rent. On top of that, Connecticut renters will be granted a 90-day rent payment grace period for April and can request a 60-day rent payment grace period for May as long as they can show that they have lost income due to the pandemic.
Cuomo has ordered a 90-day moratorium on evictions, a measure that tenant advocates and some lawmakers say does not go far enough in relieving the economic burden borne by many tenants.
State Senator Michael Gianaris of Queens, who has proposed a bill that would waive rent payments for three months, has said that the governor has not indicated whether he would take up the issue through executive action.
The mayor also reiterated his previous call for the Rent Guidelines Board to issue a rent freeze on New York City's nearly one million rent-regulated apartments. A rent freeze would only mean that mayoral-appointed board would vote not to raise rents this year. Late last month, de Blasio said he would ask the state to suspend the board's deliberations this year.
On Friday, he said his request had been denied.
Earlier in the day, the mayor and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson announced that the city would provide $25 million to emergency food providers. Combined with $25 million from the state, the total funding is expected to pay for over 19 million meals.
De Blasio on Friday spoke from the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, which has been retrofitted into a 470-bed hospital facility that can take patients from Elmhurst Hospital Center and Queens Hospital Center, two public hospitals. The opening of the facility comes as hospitalizations have lowered, suggesting that the spread of coronavirus is slowing.
But the mayor said the city could not take any chances and would continue to build out hospital capacity. He warned of a "profound danger of resurgence if we don't handle it right."
He added that the city would be ready to convert the tennis center into an isolation ward for quarantined individuals.
Infection Rate And Income Appear To Be Correlated
De Blasio's proposals on rent relief comes as the income disparity of the pandemic's effects becomes clearer.
Based on a Gothamist analysis of zip code data provided by the city, lower-income neighborhoods generally saw more infections than higher-income ones.
Corona, Queens for example, which has a median household income of less than $25,000, had a little under 2,000 cases per 100,000 people, compared to roughly 600 cases per 100,000 people in Battery Park City, a far more affluent community.
Cases per 100,000 vs. median income
Jake Dobkin / Gothamist
Number Of New Yorkers In Intensive Care Drops For The First Time Since Crisis Began
12:15 p.m. In another clear sign that the rate of coronavirus infections is slowing in New York, the number of patients across the state in intensive care units has dropped for the first time since the crisis began, Governor Andrew Cuomo said during a press conference on Friday.
"Overall, New York is flattening the curve," Cuomo said.
The number of ICU patients fell by 17 on Thursday. Overall the 3-day average of ICU patients has been trending downward as have the number of those requiring intubation or ventilators.
NYS Department of Health
Concerns about the state's hospital system crashing from a surge of patients has dramatically lessened in recent days. Despite projections that said New York hospitals would need as many as 136,000 beds, according to one Columbia University estimate, the state as of Friday is using 18,569 beds.
Before the crisis, there were approximately 53,000 hospital beds. Under the expansion, the state now has around 90,000 beds, including several thousand that have been created through federally-run field hospitals, including a 2,500-bed facility at the Javits Center in Manhattan.
"The actual care is much much lower than any of them projected," Cuomo said about the models, adding that the experts were doing they best they could with an unprecedented public health situation.
He argued that ultimately the models assumed a lower level of compliance with social distancing that what actually resulted.
"People think this is a natural trajectory," he added. "There is no natural trajectory. The trajectory is the trajectory we created by our actions."
NYC Department of Health
In another remarkable shift, Cuomo said the state was no longer trying to acquire ventilators.
As recently as this past weekend, the governor and mayor had made a desperate call for more of the life-saving equipment. Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai, the co-founders of the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, facilitated the donation of 1,000 ventilators from China and Oregon shipped 140 ventilators to the state.
The optimism about the future has been tempered by the high number of deaths from coronavirus. On Thursday, the state added 777 more deaths, the fourth day in a row that the figure exceeded 700.
As of Thursday evening, at least 7,844 people statewide have died from the disease.
Reiterating his comments in the morning, Cuomo said that rapid testing would be needed to end the crisis and have people return to work.
But in a new announcement, he proposed forming a tri-state testing coalition between New York, Connecticut and New Jersey that would partner with the federal government to roll out widespread testing.
"Let's get the testing up to scale quickly so we can build that bridge to reopening the economy," he said.
Cuomo Says Rapid Testing Is Key To When New York Can Relax Restrictions
Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday said the federal government and President Trump need to initiate a massive rollout of rapid testing for the coronavirus in order for states like New York to begin allowing people to return to work and start what is expected to be a difficult economic recovery.
"You have to have millions and millions of tests, faster than we have done in the past," Cuomo said, speaking on MSNBC.
Amid encouraging signs this week that New York has reached a plateau in the spread of the virus, Cuomo is increasingly facing questions about how the state will end the shutdown. New York state now has nearly 160,000 confirmed cases, more than any other country in the world aside from the U.S.
At Thursday's briefing, Cuomo said, "Rapid testing and testing is going to be the bridge to the new economy and getting to work and restarting. We're not going to go to go from red to green. We're going to go from red to yellow. You have rapid testing capacity. We have to bring it to scale quickly." He also stressed it's not a time to become complacent, "You can't relax. If we stop acting the way we're acting, you will see those numbers go up."
Experts have said widespread and faster testing as well as better contact tracing would be needed to assess and contain the spread of COVID-19 so that certain areas could begin lifting social distancing rules. Although President Trump on Thursday said that the U.S. has performed more than two million tests, the tests have been relatively slow and the per capita rate is low compared to South Korea, a much smaller country whose coordinated response to the pandemic has been widely praised.
On Thursday, Trump said he did not believe the country needed a nationwide testing system in order to reopen the economy.
New York is exploring partnerships with private companies to develop a rapid 15-minute test and has been working on developing an antibody test that could identify those who have recovered from the disease and who could return to work.
Still, Cuomo argued the federal government should be managing the testing process and use the Defense Production Act to spur the manufacture of rapid tests.
"They’ve taken a posture that this is a state responsibility which is wrong to me," he said. "Leaving it to the states is a slower, less uniform process."
He added: "This was a national crisis to be dealt with nationally."
Tagged
covid-19 updates
coronavirus
Elizabeth Kim
Elizabeth Kim is a reporter on the People and Power desk who covers mayoral power. She previously covered the pandemic, housing, redevelopment and public spaces. A native of Queens, she speaks fluent Mandarin. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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