Sean Penn helps Andy with testing
off-limits and indoor entertainment venues remain closed.
“Indoor gathering does not include indoor dining,” Murphy said. “I hope we’ll get to indoor dining sooner than later.”
Murphy also said he expects to be able to raise the limit on outdoor gatherings to 250 people on June 22 and 500 people on July 3 if the downward trend in the coronavirus outbreak continues.
The new executive order means schools can hold outdoor graduations of up to 500 people when those are allowed to resume July 6, he said.
Murphy’s moves Tuesday come a day after he was criticized by political opponents for attending rallies over the weekend, apparently in violation of his own executive order limiting gatherings to 25 people or fewer.
The decision wasn’t related to the pushback, Murphy said, and he echoed his earlier statements about the importance of the Black Lives Matter protests.
“I think we all thought we have to be consistent,” he said. “This is unlike any other moment in our nation’s history. We have to acknowledge that.”
The city will reach out to 10,000 New Yorkers in neighborhoods where coronavirus hit hardest to offer mental health help, Mayor de Blasio and city First Lady Chirlane McCray announced Tuesday. “Communities with the highest mental health needs may be the least likely to access mental health resources during and after the pandemic,” the mayor’s office said in a statement. “This need is intensified by the tragic deaths of black men and women at the hands of law enforcement.”
The city will set up “mental health disaster response and coping sessions” with residents from July to December, according to the statement.
The idea came from a task force to ensure racial equity in the city’s coronavirus response, which McCray is coheading.
De Blasio also credited McCray with pushing him to reallocate some funding from the NYPD to youth and social services.
“The first lady and the task force believe that the shift of funds to youth services made sense, and she can tell you about it,” he said at a press conference. “There’s no question that it was important to move more funds to youth and social services,” said McCray. Her high-profile role in the administration has drawn ongoing accusations of nepotism, especially in light of her widely expected run for Brooklyn borough president next year.
ALBANY — New York will stay focused on coronavirus testing as an indicator of infections as the state slowly reopens, Gov. Cuomo said Tuesday as he introduced a new tracking dashboard and welcomed the help of actor Sean Penn.
The governor announced that the state is teaming up with Penn’s CORE organization to establish 11 new testing sites in the most impacted zip codes in the five boroughs.
“The number of deaths are so low, thank God, that that number is no longer that informative,” Cuomo (inset top) said during a press briefing at the New York Medical College in Valhalla, Westchester County. “How many tests did we do yesterday in the region and what percent is positive of those tests? That’s the number to focus on.”
The new online dashboard will focus on the day-to-day spread of the virus and the number of positive tests recorded each day as opposed to hospitalizations and deaths, which were crucial markers at the height of the pandemic.
The new tracking system shows that the city had 2% positives, or 340 new cases, from 18,789 tests conducted a day earlier. The Big Apple entered the first phase of the state’s four-part reopening plan on Monday.
However, certain neighborhoods, such as Bathgate in the Bronx, have troubling infection rates as high as 51%, the governor noted, sparking the need for more walk-in testing sites.
“We are attacking these hotspots and we start with testing and increasing testing,” Cuomo said, thanking Penn (inset below) for ramping up testing. “His group came in, they mobilized and they did great work opening up testing sites in a very short period of time.”
Penn, beamed into the briefing via video, heaped praise on the governor.
“We’re proud to be in partnership with you,” Penn said.