NYC mayor defends decision to close public schools as virus cases rise

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday defended his decision to shut down the public school system as a second coronavirus wave spreads.

The move to remote learning for the system’s 1.1 million students was announced Wednesday after the city’s seven-day average reached the 3% positive testing rate threshold.

“We’ve got to fight back the second wave,” De Blasio told reporters Thursday. “Our schools have been safe, extraordinarily safe. We’ve got to keep it that way. We can’t just stand pat with a strategy that worked before when conditions are changing. We need to reset the equation.”

De Blasio said he expects the state to shut down gyms and indoor dining at restaurants in the next week or two.

Critics have questioned the logic of closing schools — where no massive outbreaks of coronavirus cases have been reported — at the same time that city restaurants remain open for indoor dining.

“I was really pleased with how things were going in New York City,” Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN Thursday, referring to the reopening of schools in September.

“It demonstrated that in the nation’s largest school system you could safely bring children into school. … But I think the city tied their hands when they were linked to that 3% community positivity rate because they hit that, but they hit that and, at the same time, they’ve been able to maintain a safe environment in the schools.”

Besser noted that a health commissioner of another state told him “that for a lot of children, being in the classroom where their mask wearing can be observed, where social distancing can be monitored, is really the safest place for them.”

New York City Councilman Mark Levine, chair of the health committee, agreed and said indoor dining and gyms should have been shuttered and people encouraged to work from home before learning went remote.

“Families, teachers have gone through an incredibly traumatic 24 hours and we haven’t taken the critical public health measures that we need,” he told CNN on Thursday. “And what it all boils down to is, today in New York City a kid cannot learn in their classroom but they can have a meal at indoor dining.”

Levine added, “We should be prioritizing reopening for elementary school students and students with special needs because we know that there’s a pedagogical cost and a social-emotional cost to online learning. And, in fact, there are 60,000 kids in New York City that don’t even have a connected device. So I’m not sure how this is going to work with them. I guess they’ll have paper handouts. We’ve got to figure this out.”

De Blasio said Thursday the city’s seven-day rolling average rose to a 3.01% test positivity rate. The city reported 1,255 new cases of Covid-19 on a 7-day average.

“This number just keeps growing and this worries me a lot,” said de Blasio, noting the city’s 550-case threshold.

For those who might feel better if they knew indoor dining and gyms were also closing, De Blasio said, “It’s just a matter of time. It’s very likely to be in the next week or two.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday the statewide positivity rate, including “micro-cluster zones,” dropped to 2.7% from 3.4% the previous day.

The governor said the weeks leading up January will be a dangerous time.

“If I had to predict, you’re going to see a significant spike post-Thanksgiving,” Cuomo said. “It is then going to run into the Christmas holidays, and you’re going to see these numbers go very high.”

He said it’s “better to stay away” from Thanksgiving gatherings this year.

Cuomo has said reopening schools in New York City would require a different plan than the rest of the state because by sheer volume it wouldn’t be possible to test every student in the city.