S.I. Ferry is switching to hourly service
800 are in quarantine at city jails: document
Service on the Staten Island Ferry will be slashed starting Monday as the coronavirus outbreak has caused ridership to sink on the route, Mayor de Blasio announced.
Boats will run every hour until further notice, but service will still operate 24 hours a day, according to the city Department of Transportation.
De Blasio last week announced less drastic cuts in ferry service, saying boats would run every 20 or 30 minutes during peak periods instead of the usual 15-minute headways.
Hizzoner said ridership on the route has dropped by roughly 86% compared with “prepandemic levels.”
The ferry serves some 70,000 riders each weekday, making it the busiest ferry route in the country. But since the pandemic forced the majority of New Yorkers to remain at home, the boats have served fewer than 10,000 people a day, data show.
The city’s other public transportation systems have seen similar dips in ridership.
The spread of coronavirus has left nearly 800 people quarantined in city jails, the Daily News has learned.
The majority of those individuals are at Rikers Island, with over 350 of them at the Anna M. Kross Center and more than 80 others at West Facility — the location of the jail’s communicable disease unit, according to an internal document obtained by The News.
The George R. Vierno Center has about 75 people in quarantine, while the newly reopened Eric M. Taylor Center has just over 70. As of Saturday, there were 4,740 people in city custody, data show.
The numbers — which were taken over the weekend and continue to fluctuate based on new arrests, approved releases and other factors — are an indication that the Correction Department and Correctional Health Services do not have a handle on the outbreak, said Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association President Elias Husamudeen.
“If we continue to medically isolate at this rate, all of Rikers Island is going to be under quarantine,” Husamudeen said.
“I don’t think the department is prepared to handle this. … Something needs to be done immediately, and [the Correction Department] seems unable or unwilling to do whatever is necessary to deal with it.”
So far, 114 Correction Department staffers and 139 inmates have tested positive for COVID-19, officials said Sunday.
Correction Department staffers are screened for flulike symptoms before entering the jails, a Correctional Health Services spokeswoman said. Correctional Health Services has not yet released the number of people it has tested.
Husamudeen — who has called for a centralized coronavirus testing site at Rikers to better screen officers going in and out of facilities — said that the city is running out of time.
“Eventually we’re going to end up in a situation where everyone gets sick,” he said. “There are officers who are not going home [after work] because they do not want to give it to their families. … [The city has] not done enough to protect people.”