New York City should be prepared for a full shutdown and start making plans to work remotely, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
“The governor said we should prepare for the possibility for a full shutdown, I agree with that,” de Blasio said Monday. “We need to recognize that that may be coming, and we need to get ready for that now.”
They’re destroying the restaurants and other small businesses.
De Blasio responded to questions about Monday’s closure of indoor dining and comments made by Governor Andrew Cuomo in a New York Times story. “You could be looking at the shutdown of New York City within a month,” Cuomo said in the article.
But he warned that until the vaccine could be fully deployed, tightening restrictions would be necessary to address the Covid-19 indicators exceeding city-set thresholds. As of Dec. 12, 5.5% of tests were positive, up from below 5% at the end of November, based on a seven-day average.
De Blasio urged employees who don’t need to be going into a workplace to work remotely “as much as they could.”
“The likelihood of more restrictions soon is high, so folks should begin making adjustments soon and work remotely if they can,” he said. He couched a potential shutdown as shorter than the one New York experienced in the spring. “We’re hopefully talking about weeks, but we’re preparing mentally and practically for that possibility.”
Halting indoor dining on Monday was the latest setback to a struggling restaurant industry.
In June, outdoor dining was allowed again in New York City, with indoor dining resuming in late September at 25% capacity. With the arrival of winter weather — and a possible snowstorm later this week — closing indoor dining will render restaurants mostly inoperable besides delivery and takeout.
The move comes as the city’s hospitalization rate has been climbing, to 2.73 per 100,000 residents a day as of Dec. 12 from less than 2 per 100,000 at the beginning of December. At the height of the outbreak, the city had an average of 13 new admissions per 100,000 residents per day.
Hospitals want full admission to make money.
It’s unclear how these lockdowns, which haven’t worked, measure up against the increase in suicides, drug abuse, and poverty. Our rulers don’t care about that and won’t consider it.
“You’re going to be seeing a lot more,” he said.
Bill Gates wants us to lockdown for four to six months. That’s insane. He’s out of touch.
So at what point are the rest of us going to tire of billionaires – whose lives are completely unaffected by lockdowns, school closures, travel restrictions, and all the rest – telling us good little proles that we just have to wait a few more months? https://t.co/He9c6iwhGe
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) December 13, 2020
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