NEW YORK (AP) — New York City advised grocery stores Wednesday to require customers to cover their faces while shopping as officials said they would create an emergency food reserve and take other steps to safeguard residents’ sustenance. Meanwhile, the mayor urged a cautious approach to reviving the economy.
Here are the latest coronavirus developments in New York:
FOOD PLAN
In a city where 1.2 million residents — including one in five children — already struggled at times to feed themselves, the number is expected to grow as an estimated half-million New Yorkers have lost or are likely to lose their jobs in the immediate future.
“We will make sure everyone gets the food they need,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in unveiling a $170 million plan to help.
The city already is handing out 250,000 free meals a day at schools and delivering 25,000 a day to senior citizens. Officials expect to provide 10 million free meals in April and expect the need to grow to as much as 15 million in May.
Meanwhile, the city has contacted some 11,000 taxi and livery drivers — whose livelihoods have been shattered as people stay home — to hire them to deliver meals to those who can’t leave home, the mayor said.
While officials said the city food supply is stable, they also plan to create a $50 million reserve of as many as 18 million shelf-stable meals.
And in what de Blasio cast as another step to safeguard the food supply, the city is calling for stores to make customers wear face coverings in order to protect store workers against exposure.
“We need to keep each other safe. We need to keep these grocery store and supermarket workers safe,” he said at a news briefing.
The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death.
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THE ECONOMIC EQUATION
While outlining the hardships New Yorkers are facing, de Blasio said leaders need to be deliberative about trying to rev up the economy.
“I want to restart the economy desperately … but the best way to do it is to be careful,” he said, warning that moving too quickly could create an opportunity for the coronavirus to come roaring back.
De Blasio, whose city is the epicenter of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak, said Wednesday that some parts of Asia have experienced a resurgence of the virus after reopening.
De Blasio spoke after the city’s health department revised its toll of COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday by adding 3,778 “probable” coronavirus deaths among people who showed symptoms but were never tested for the virus. The new methodology raises the city’s virus toll to more than 10,000.
“The first thing to think about is the human reality of thousands more human beings we lost and families that are in pain,” the Democrat told “Fox and Friends” early Wednesday. “But then we also have to think about what it means for all of us and to really recognize the sheer ferocity of this disease.”
In an earlier interview on CNN’s “New Day,” de Blasio said the new numbers show New Yorkers that “we’ve all gone through hell here.”
