Wal-Mart, Stop & Shop Cut Hours, US Deaths Hit 58 As Oregon Confirms 1st Covid-19 Fatality: Live Updates

March 16, 2020 687

Update (1130ET): Despite complaints about strict testing requirements and a general sense of hysteria leaving thousands self-quarantined out of fear of spreading or catching the virus, the number of confirmed cases in NYC has skyrocketed from fewer than 30 earlier in the week to 269 as of Sunday morning.

Over the past week, Mayor Bill de Blasio and NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo have insisted that they will do everything possible to keep NYC’s subway and its schools – which hundreds of thousands of children depend on for shelter and food – open. But on Sunday, with the mayor coming under increasing fire from public health activists warning that he might be putting immuno-compromised and other at-risk individuals in danger by denying that students who catch the virus as school could spread it to their parents asymptomatically (research suggests the virus can spread before symptoms emerge).

“Every option is on the table in a crisis,” de Blasio said during an appearance on CNN Sunday morning. “We’ve never seen anything like this.” Meanwhile, some local officials are taking matters into their own hands, with the Acting Queens Borough President Sharon Lee urging all families in the borough to keep their kids home from school next week after a student at a school in Woodhaven tested positive.

During the interview on CNN, de Blasio said that contingency plans are being “set up”, but as one reporter pointed out, it doesn’t sound like the city has a ‘contingency plan’ in place to handle the backlash from closing the city’s schools, which is an incredibly rare occurrence: even one- and two-day closures due to weather in the winter are rare in NYC

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