Mayor and Governor Clash Over N.Y.C. School Shutdown: Live Updates

Governor and Mayor at odds over New York City school shutdown.

The tussle between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over the mayor’s decision to keep New York City’s schools closed for the rest of the academic year dragged into a third day on Monday.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the closings on Saturday, but Mr. Cuomo insisted that the final decision was his and that it was too soon to make one.

“We won’t open schools one minute sooner than they should be opened,” Mr. Cuomo said on Sunday, “but we won’t open schools one minute later than they should be opened, either.”

“Nobody knows what we will be doing in June,” he added, in a seeming rebuke to the mayor.

Mr. de Blasio reiterated on Monday morning that he and the city schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, had the authority to make the decision to keep schools closed for the city’s 1.1 million schoolchildren.

“We’re not reopening schools,” he said on MSNBC. “It won’t be safe for all the people we’re supposed to protect, and our job, our responsibility is to them.”

When asked on WPIX-TV on Monday what confused parents should do, Mr. de Blasio said, “They should simply plan on the fact that they’ll be closed. I’m quite convinced that they will be and that’s the right thing to do.”

Last month, Mr. Cuomo pre-empted Mr. de Blasio on the original decision to close schools, announcing it before Mr. de Blasio had a chance to do so. The two politicians have been at odds for years.

758 more people have died in New York, bringing the total dead from the coronavirus in the state to 9,385.

Mr. Cuomo said on Sunday that 758 more people had died from the coronavirus in New York, bringing the state’s death total to 9,385.

The virus killed more than 5,200 people in New York State last week alone.

Other indicators were more positive, the governor said, continuing last week’s pattern during which, even as hundreds of people died daily, rates of hospitalization and other data suggested that the spread of the virus had slowed.

Mr. Cuomo said 8,236 new people had tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing the total statewide to 188,694. The number of people newly hospitalized, 53, was “the lowest number since we started doing these charts,” he said.

Mr. Cuomo said he would sign an executive order on Sunday that would direct employers at essential businesses to provide their workers with cloth or surgical face masks to wear when interacting with the public.

Mayor De Blasio announced new testing sites in hard-hit communities.

New York City last week released preliminary data showing that the coronavirus is killing black and Latino New Yorkers at twice the rate that it is killing white New Yorkers.

On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would open testing centers in an effort to begin addressing those disparities.

Mr. de Blasio said there continued to be encouraging signs in the city’s fight against the virus. The number of those who needed to be intubated on a daily basis continued to fall, to about 70 patients a day from 200 to 300, he said.

The mayor added that the city had a large enough supply of ventilators to get through the week. He said that all city workers who had contact with the public would be required to wear face coverings starting on Monday.

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Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Shaina Feinberg, Andrew Hinderaker, Jan Hoffman, Azi Paybarah, Julia Rothman, Edgar Sandoval, Eliza Shapiro, Tracey Tully and Katie Van Syckle.