New York City to cancel street festivals set for summer

NEW YORK — New York City is barring its famous summer street celebrations for the month of June, and the state is exploring new ways to expand coronavirus testing.

Amid hopeful trends in virus-related deaths and hospitalizations, officials in New York City and the state are trying to make sure the outbreak doesn’t come roaring back.

“This is cause and effect on steroids,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday at his daily briefing. “What we do today will determine tomorrow.”

Three of the city’s major annual celebrations scheduled in June that will be canceled this year are the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, the Celebrate Israel parade and the Pride parade on its 50th anniversary.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday that the events would be canceled or at least postponed, saying that it was a painful but necessary step as the city continues to fight the coronavirus.

“They will be back, and we will find the right way to do it,” he said, allowing that it’s not yet clear whether it will be realistic to reschedule the events this year.

The Pride parade began in 1970 as a way to commemorate the Stonewall rebellion the year before, when a police raid at the Stonewall Inn bar sparked a resistance by gay men, bisexuals, lesbians and transgender people and led to the development of more extensive and militant LGBTQ activist groups than the U.S. had seen before.

“As the days have passed, it has become more and more clear that even with a decline in the spread of covid-19, large-scale events such as ours are unlikely to happen in the near future,” Maryanne Roberto Fine, NYC Pride Co-Chair, said in a prepared statement. “We understand that we need to reimagine NYC Pride events — and have already begun to do just that.”

The Puerto Rico and Israel parades are also touchstones in a city that has the largest Jewish population outside Israel and the biggest Puerto Rican community off the island.

The number of people dying from covid-19 in New York state continues to slowly drop, with 478 fatalities tallied on Sunday. It was a third straight day of decreases and the lowest death toll since April 1, when 432 people died. A record 799 deaths were recorded April 8.

More than 14,000 people have died in New York state since the start of the outbreak last month. The state tally excludes more than 4,000 New York City deaths that were blamed on the virus on death certificates but weren’t confirmed by a lab test.

The total number of hospitalizations remained largely unchanged from the day before at 16,103, and the number of new admissions remained largely flat at 1,380, Cuomo said Monday. Both numbers are down compared to last week.

After weeks of increases in deaths and hospitalizations in the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, Cuomo said the big question now is how fast the descent will be.

“Does it take two weeks for it to come down? Some projections say that. Does it take a month? Some projections say that,” Cuomo noted. “The projections are nice, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on them.”

More than 247,500 people in the state have tested positive for coronavirus, a number that does not include people who have not had a laboratory test.

New York state’s largest nurses’ union filed separate lawsuits against the state health department, a hospital network and a hospital over working conditions for nurses treating covid-19 patients.

The New York State Nurses Association charged in the lawsuits filed against the department, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Westchester County Health Care Corp. that its members have been forced to labor in unsafe working conditions without adequate masks or surgical gowns.