Dear John,

I hope you and your family are doing as well as you possibly can, in these totally impossible times, as we close our second full week of this new reality. The disruption to our normal lives, jobs, homes, schools, and more has been enormous, but I am taking inspiration from the courage and dedication of the health care, grocery store, transit, delivery, child care, and other workers who are sustaining all of us. And in the many, many ways that neighbors are stepping up to help one another. 

The news continues to be dire. As of last report, there were 25,398 positive confirmed cases of COVID-19 in NYC. Roughly 5,325 people are hospitalized with COVID-19, with 1,290 of them in the ICU. Across the five boroughs, 365 of our neighbors have already died from it, including beloved Brooklyn principal Dez-Anne Romaine, safe streets advocate Judy Richheimer, and the first homeless New Yorker lost to COVID. Those numbers will continue to grow every day, likely for weeks to come, and it’s going to be hard to remember that every one is a unique soul, mourned by loved ones.

On Thursday I joined a call with Dr. Mitch Katz, head of NYC Health + Hospitals, and was reminded that we’re fortunate to be in a city that has invested in preserving 11 public hospitals, where so many cities have not saved a single one. But those public hospitals (especially Elmhurst Hospital), like our private ones (e.g. the 175-year-old Brooklyn Hospital, where Walt Whitman brought peaches and poems to Civil War wounded) are being overwhelmed by sick and dying patients. Health care staff don’t have enough personal protective equipment, and we are still thousands of beds short of what we will need when the apex of infections hits (If you want to support NYC H+H health care staff right now, you can donate here). 

The City and State are working hard to create new hospital capacity (the new 1,000 bed facility at the Javits Center will open on Monday) and secure more ventilators. Businesses (including many at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard) are stepping up to produce masks. And everyone is asked to do their part by following the public health guidelines for social distancing in stores, in the parks, and in the streets to limit infection. 

One piece of good news is that the State heeded our calls to halt non-essential construction. They’ve given a week to close up construction sites safely (and yes, it would have been better if they had started doing that when Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Councilmember Carlos Menchaca and I called for it more than a week ago and better if the shutdown was wider, more on this below). There will be real economic hardship for workers, big losses for developers, and a further blow to the economy. But lives matter more. 

Now that most of what can be shut down is shut down, and many of us are at home 24/7, federal, state and city attention is turning to how to support people and institutions through the catastrophic economic disruption that this crisis brings. 

In this email: 
Update on the Federal Response
City and State Updates
Additional Resources
Upcoming Community Calls

Update on the Federal Response

Yesterday afternoon the House of Representatives passed the Senate’s $4.2 trillion dollar stimulus package. While this proposal includes far too many corporate giveaways with few strings attached, there are some real pieces of good news. And a lot of work left to do to make sure no one is left out.

The good news: As noted earlier this week, the bill expands unemployment insurance (though not to cover 100% of current salary as I wrote earlier; now that we have them, the details are a bit more complicated). People will get $600 on top of what they are eligible for in state unemployment insurance for up to 4 months. Gig workers and freelancers will be eligible for the federal disaster unemployment insurance. Direct, one-time cash assistance will be sent to many Americans, $1200 for people making under $75,000 and a smaller amount for people making up to $99,000 with an additional $500 per child. There is funding for hospitals, community health centers, transit systems including the MTA, small businesses, and direct funding for state and local governments, although definitely not enough for the crisis we face. 

What’s not there: Unlike the earlier House version, the final bill does nothing for people with federal student debt, it does not include funding for protecting voting access in the current context, and there are no emergency health care standards to insure better working conditions for the health care workers on the front lines of this crisis. But most egregiously, the bill excludes undocumented immigrants and many immigrants with legal status from both unemployment insurance, direct cash assistance, and Medicaid expansion. 

The bad: The bill provides $475 in corporate bail out funds with very little oversight and no requirement that corporations keep their workers on the payroll. During a week when 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment (far more than any week in American history) and as we anticipate many, many more weeks of hardship, this is outrageous. 

City and State Updates

Additional Resources 

Resources for individuals, families, and businesses to get or give support are being updated regularly on our COVID-19 Resources Page here. Sending a few new ones that we added recently: 

Next Community Calls

We are in the process of scheduling more virtual calls to support our communities. Here are the calls we are currently planning for next week (put them on your calendar and we’ll have more details soon): 

We’ve made it through two weeks. We know there are too many more weeks to go, and that they will be hard ones, with mounting anxiety, deep economic hardship, and lost lives. 

But working together, we will make it through each one of them. Thanks for what you’ve done so far to support each other along the way.

Brad 

456 Fifth Avenue, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
718-499-1090
[email protected]

    

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