Here’s what you need to know:
- N.Y.C. will limit crowds at two parks amid concerns over unequal social-distance policing.
- A 5-year-old has died of a mysterious illness linked to the coronavirus.
- N.Y.C. rent board takes step toward approving freeze.
- New Jersey’s governor will be ‘shocked’ if beaches don’t open by May 25.
- N.Y.C. Health Department will not lead on virus tracing.
N.Y.C. will limit crowds at two parks amid concerns over unequal social-distance policing.
Last weekend, a kind of split-screen photo montage of New York City circulated widely on social media.
One image showed a dense crowd of mostly white people sunbathing in Hudson River Park in Manhattan, apparently flouting social-distancing rules. Another showed a police officer beating a black man in a confrontation that began over an attempt to enforce social distancing rules.
Many people pointed to the two images as evidence that the police were engaged in a racist double standard when it came to enforcing the rules. The notion gained further traction Thursday night, when the Brooklyn district attorney revealed that 35 of the 40 people arrested in the borough for social-distancing violations as of May 4 were black.
On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would address both concerns.
Mr. de Blasio said that the police would limit crowds at two piers at Hudson River Park and another popular park, Domino Park in Brooklyn, starting this weekend.
And concerning the lopsided race numbers in arrests, Mr. de Blasio wrote on Twitter that while summons and arrests were tools for saving lives, “The disparity in the numbers does NOT reflect our values. We HAVE TO do better and we WILL.”
At his daily briefing on Friday, Mr. de Blasio reiterated that the disparity was unacceptable. But he cautioned against drawing conclusions from the data, saying the numbers of arrests and summons were small relative to the city’s population.
“We’re talking about very few people have been arrested and very few people have been summonsed,” Mr. de Blasio said. “And there’s been a huge amount of restraint by the N.Y.P.D. — that’s just factually obvious from the numbers. And we intend to keep it that way.”
The Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, said he was reviewing the social-distancing arrests in the borough to determine if criminal charges were warranted. His office’s policy during the coronavirus pandemic has been to decline misdemeanor cases that do not involve public safety threats, including social-distancing cases.
The crowd limits at the two parks will take different forms. At Hudson River Park, the police will limit the number of people at Piers 45 and 46 in Greenwich Village. At Domino Park, on the East River in Williamsburg, the city would increase the police presence and monitor crowd sizes.
In both cases, officials would seek to limit the amount of time people spent at the parks.
“If you’re going in, you’re going in for a limited period of time,” the mayor said.
A 5-year-old has died of a mysterious illness linked to the coronavirus.
A five-year-old died in New York City on Thursday from what appeared to be a rare syndrome linked to the coronavirus that causes life-threatening inflammation in children, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.
It is believed to be the first known death in New York related to the mysterious new syndrome, which officials said began to appear in recent weeks.
Mr. Cuomo said Friday that 73 children in New York area had been reported afflicted with the illness, which doctors have labeled “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome.” He said the state Health Department was investigating whether other deaths of children were caused by the syndrome.
“This would be really painful news and would open up an entirely different chapter. Mr. Cuomo said. “Because I can’t tell you how many people I spoke to who took peace and solace in the fact that children were not getting infected.”
In an apparently separate case, officials in Westchester County said on Friday that a child being treated there for the illness had died last week.
The child suffered neurological complications from the syndrome, said Dr. Michael Gewitz, the physician-in-chief at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, where the child was being treated.
The county’s health commissioner, Dr. Sherlita Amler, said that officials were still assessing whether underlying conditions might have been a factor in the child’s death.
N.Y.C. rent board takes step toward approving freeze.
A one-year rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments and lofts in New York City came one step closer to reality after a preliminary vote by the Rent Guidelines Board Thursday.
The proposal, which would freeze rents on one-year leases signed on or after Oct. 1, 2020, and the first year of two-year leases, was approved by a 5-4 preliminary vote. The final vote will be on June 17. On two-year leases, the proposal would allow 1-percent increases in the second year.
Tenant advocates largely praised the decision, though some said it did not go far enough.
“We see it as an overall win and a historic win for tenants,” said Leah Goodridge, a member of the board who represents tenants, “but we sought a lot more, especially for the essential workers who are helping hold up New York City right now, who live in these apartments,”
Several landlords’ organizations had proposed rent freezes of shorter duration, with higher increases in future years that they said would be necessary for landlords to keep up with operating costs.
Mayor de Blasio had advocated for a rent freeze and for the board’s meetings to be suspended during the coronavirus crisis.
The Rent Stabilization Association, a landlords’ group, condemned the vote, saying on Twitter that freezing rent “expedited the deterioration of the city’s aging housing stock.”
The association said in a statement, “If there’s going to be a rent freeze, the mayor needs to take the same steps for building owners and enact a freeze on property taxes and water and sewer bills.”
New Jersey’s governor will be ‘shocked’ if beaches don’t open by May 25.
Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said Thursday night that he expected the state’s beaches — among its top tourism draws and a major economic engine — to open by Memorial Day, even amid the pandemic.
“I will be shocked if our beaches are not open, but with very specific guidance just as we opened county and state parks,” Mr. Murphy said on NJTV Thursday night.
Mr. Murphy has said for some time that he hoped to see beaches and boardwalks, which have been closed to limit the spread of the virus, opened by Memorial Day, the start of the summer season on the Jersey Shore.
Social-distancing guidelines would still apply to any plan to open the beaches, Mr. Murphy said.
But on Friday morning, Mr. Murphy said he was encouraged by residents’ adherence to those rules when New Jersey reopened state and county parks.
“We had a good test run last weekend,” Mr. Murphy said on CNN.
New Jersey has the second-most coronavirus cases and deaths in the country, behind New York. As of Thursday, at least 8,800 people had died of the virus, and 15,000 people had tested positive in the past week.
N.Y.C. Health Department will not lead on virus tracing.
New York City will soon assemble more than 1,000 disease detectives to trace the contacts of every person who tests positive for the coronavirus, an approach seen as crucial to quelling the outbreak and paving the way to reopen the hobbled city.
But Mayor de Blasio said Friday that the effort would not be led by the city’s renowned Health Department, which for decades has conducted contact tracing for diseases like tuberculosis, H.I.V. and Ebola.
Instead, in a departure from current and past practice, the city is going to put the vast new public health apparatus in the hands of its public hospital system, Health and Hospitals.
In announcing the move Friday morning, the mayor said, “Everything at Health and Hospitals has been based on speed and intensity and precision, and they’ve done an amazing job.”
But the decision puzzled some current and former health officials.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett, a former city health commissioner under Mr. de Blasio who now direct the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, said the three key elements of handling the virus — testing, tracing and quarantine — had long been performed by the Health Department.
“These are core functions of public health agencies around the world, including New York City, which has decades of experience,” she said in an email.
Her new full-time job: trying to collect unemployment benefits.
Seven weeks after she filed for unemployment benefits, Nadine Josephs was running out of money. The birthdays of her two teenage children loomed, and she was spending her days pleading for forbearance on overdue bills.
Holed up in her apartment in the East New York, Brooklyn, Ms. Josephs, 46, had grown increasingly frustrated since she filed her claim on March 16. And she was tired of hearing assurances from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to the thousands of desperate New Yorkers like her that the checks would be in the mail.
She had checked the mail, her email and her voice mail: No word from Albany in more than a month.
Between negotiations with the phone company and a furniture-rental company, Ms. Josephs tried every avenue she could think of to draw attention to her plight. She called the State Department of Labor at all hours, posted pleas on Facebook and Twitter, and even tweeted daily at the governor himself.
“I’m just praying this can be resolved,” she said in an interview. “My back is against the wall.”
Ms. Josephs, who had worked in the Manhattan office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was part of the first wave of unemployment claimants who overwhelmed the Department of Labor in mid-March.
Since then, the state has received more than 1.6 million claims, including many from gig workers and other independent contractors who normally would not qualify for benefits.
Mr. Cuomo said on Monday that “the good news is even if there’s a delay on the website, it doesn’t cost you any money.” Everybody who filed a legitimate claim would receive all of their benefits dating back to when they first applied, he said.
But people like Ms. Josephs have been through an emotional wringer. She said the stress of having no income for two months had caused her migraines and led to very dark thoughts.
A New York man sold stolen test kits and never gave buyers results, officials said.
A New York man is facing fraud charges after he conned several people into buying stolen coronavirus test kits and then never gave them the results, the authorities said on Thursday.
The man, Henry Gindt II, 34, sold the test kits for up to $200 through his telemedicine website YouHealth, which served as a front for the scheme, federal prosecutors said.
Investigators said that Mr. Gindt had misrepresented himself as being connected with a lab that would send people results after they collected nasal specimens with a swab.
Along with the test kits, customers received questionnaires about their symptoms and prepaid shipping labels for the bogus lab, according to the authorities, who said they had been tipped off by a resident of western Pennsylvania who received an email from Mr. Gindt advertising the home test.
Mr. Gindt was charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, said Scott W. Brady, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Are you a health care worker in the New York area? Tell us what you’re seeing.
As The New York Times follows the spread of the coronavirus across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, we need your help. We want to talk to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, respiratory therapists, emergency services workers, nursing home managers — anyone who can share what’s happening in the region’s hospitals and other health care centers.
A reporter or editor may contact you. Your information will not be published without your consent.
Reporting was contributed by Michael Gold, J. David Goodman, Jeffery C. Mays, Patrick McGeehan, Andy Newman, Sarah Maslin Nir, William K. Rashbaum, Andrea Salcedo, Ashley Southall, Neil Vigdor and Ali Watkins.
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