New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted the city will begin to reopen under phase one by mid-June.
During a coronavirus press conference Tuesday, the mayor said he feels “confident” that the city will enter phase one in the first or second week of June. Phase one permits manufacturing and construction jobs to resume.
He did not commit to a specific reopening date and said several requirements needed to reopen remain unfulfilled.
One of the requirements is not having enough open hospital beds. NYC is lacking 420 hospital beds in order to reach the 30% opening of beds required by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to reopen. The city also needs to hire more contact tracers to fulfill the requirement of 2,500, which de Blasio said will be achieved "in the first two weeks of June."
Only 63 people were hospitalized Monday with for a suspected COVID-19 case in New York City, which is 1/10th of the amount of people in hospitals March 20 when the city was shut down, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reports. de Blasio said he wants to see fewer than 375 people in ICUs across the city's 11 public hospitals before he begins to reopen the city.
He also said he has not figured out how to enforce social distancing on the subway system once people are allowed to return to work.
"We still have to make sure we don't end up with a lot of crowded buses and subway cars," he said. "As we get closer to phase one, we'll provide people with clearer guidance on how to approach that."
He said details like whether masks will be handed out are currently under discussion.
"But I think the central question, working with the MTA is, what's the maximum amount of service they can put into play and what measures do we need to put in place to make sure there is social distancing in place," he said. "We're working on that right now."
He said phase one would last at least several weeks.
Phase one will mean hundreds of thousands of people getting back onto public transport again. Currently, the subway is being cleaned every night.
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