Coronavirus in New York City: Pressure Mounts for Bigger Shutdown

A handful of City Council members, including Corey Johnson, the council speaker, as well as the city comptroller, Scott Stringer, expressed outrage that some people ignored officials’ pleas to stay home and instead converged at clubs and bars. The officials, using the hashtag #shutdownNYC on Twitter, described the disregard of social distancing as reckless behavior.

“I am alarmed at the cavalier attitude of most New Yorkers who still don’t seem to understand what’s about to hit us and what we need to slow it,” Councilman Mark Levine, who is chairman of the council Health Committee, said Sunday morning.

Levine renewed his calls for the city to shut down almost all places of gathering, including movie theaters, gyms, courthouses and schools. Stringer also called for a city shutdown because it was clear “we need more aggressive social distancing.”

By noon, Johnson joined the campaign, calling for the closure of schools, restaurants and bars.

“We must be bold, but we must also be prepared,” Johnson said in a statement. “We need to make sure impacted businesses like bars are able to survive and employees are taken care of until we’re back to normal.”

Johnson, a Democrat, said that grocery stores, bodegas, pharmacies and banks should remain open. He said all levels of government should intervene to ease the losses of business owners, provide financial assistance to affected workers and help parents with child care.

Earlier this week, Cuomo banned events of more than 500 people while curtailing the capacity of business establishments that hold fewer than 500 people, like restaurants and bars, to less than 50%.

Just across the Hudson River, officials in Hoboken, New Jersey, on Saturday ordered the closure of all gyms, health clubs, day care centers and movie theaters and issued an indefinite curfew. Bars that do not serve food will have to shut down as of Sunday morning. Restaurants can offer takeout and delivery but will have to shut their dining rooms. As of Monday night, residents will be under curfew from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview on CNN on Sunday that he would “like to see a dramatic diminution of the personal interaction we see in restaurants and in bars.”

“There are going to be people who are young who are going to wind up getting seriously ill,” he said.

In a separate interview, Fauci suggested that the federal government should consider a 14-day national shutdown.

“I would prefer as much as we possibly could,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting.”

Asked about the shutdown calls in New York City, de Blasio on Sunday did not rule out enacting more aggressive actions to restrict social interactions.

“Every option is on the table,” de Blasio said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that combating the virus was “unlike anything we have dealt with in our memory.”

The mayor said he would be coordinating any further restrictions with Cuomo.

De Blasio’s remarks were a sign of the fast-paced fluidity of the situation and officials’ morphing response to it: On Saturday, the mayor said he was not ready to support broader restrictions and business closures.

“History shows us that in crisis relatively few people have a perfect, absolutely tried and true plan,” de Blasio said Saturday. “I am not ready today at this hour to say, let’s have a city with no bars, no restaurants, no rec centers, no libraries. I’m not there. And we will make that judgment every hour of every day.”

For days, de Blasio has faced calls to close public schools, a move he has been reluctant to make, arguing that it could lead to classes being canceled for the entire year. Cuomo has said he was leaving those decisions to local jurisdictions.

On Sunday, that pressure only seemed to escalate when the Queens acting borough president, Sharon Lee, urged parents to stop sending their children to school.

“I strongly urge all Queens families, in no uncertain terms, to keep all children home away from school this week,” Lee said in a statement.

With more than 600 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus in New York, some elected officials see a broader shutdown of the city as urgent and inevitable.

Stephen Levin, a councilman from Brooklyn, called for a more expansive shutdown of the city, concerned that the city’s hospital could be overrun in a few weeks if more sweeping interventions are not taken.

“All the objective evidence we can gather is converging on a giant red flashing SOS,” Levin said. “If you look at China and Italy, you can see what can happen here. It doesn’t have to happen here, but it can happen.”

Councilman Justin Brannan said he was concerned that there are mixed messages coming from city officials, leaving New Yorkers confused about whether they should be supporting local businesses or ordering food delivered to their homes to avoid congestion.

“I was driving around last night, and people are out and about like it’s a spring day,” said Brannan, who supports a more expansive shutdown.

“Are we going out and supporting our small businesses, or are we staying in? Am I sending my kid to schools with 1,000 other kids?” Brannan said. “There needs to be discipline in the message. People are at home reading articles about Italy and making their own decisions.”

On Sunday, Cuomo appeared to acknowledge the clamor for more extensive closures in New York.

The governor said that each person’s decision to observe or ignore social distancing recommendations would “impact us all tomorrow.”

“STAY HOME,” he said on Twitter.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .