NYC Coronavirus 'Restart' Team To Begin Meeting Next Week: Mayor

NeW YORK, NY — New York City's coronavirus recovery will be a "transformation" similar to the New Deal after the Great Depression, starting with task forces to restart the city's economy that will meet next week, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday.

The mayor announced 11 new task forces Sunday that will lead the city's immediate and long-term recovery from the new coronavirus pandemic, including eight councils focused on restarting the city's economy that will meet the first week of May.

The councils are the start of what will be a transformative rebuilding of New York City focused not just on getting back to normal, but on addressing racial and economic disparities that the pandemic "laid bare," de Blasio said.

"I don't want to see recovery mean 'Let's just go back to the status quo," de Blasio said, comparing his plan to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's sweeping programs after the Great Depression. "We're going to learn the powerful lessons of this horrible tragedy."

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De Blasio said the plan for reopening the city will be put in place once the "key indicators" of hospitalizations, positive tests and the number of people in intensive care related to the pandemic consistently go down for 10 to 14 days.

On Sunday, all of those indicators had either stayed the same or gone down from the previous day, de Blasio said.

The restart groups include councils on small business, large business, public health and healthcare, arts, culture and tourism, labor, nonprofits and social services, faith-based communities and education and vocational training.

The short-term recovery will also include another "Racial Inclusion and Equity Task Force" that will be led by First Lady Chirlane McCray and Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson, de Blasio said.

Another "Fair Recovery Task Force" will tackle the long-term recovery process, which the mayor said will likely extend beyond his last 20 months in office. The city will put together a Charter Revision Commission to make changes to the city's charter, the mayor said.

The longterm recovery will focus on disparities that have become more evident during the coronavirus pandemic, including the lack of a safety net for working families and racial inequality, de Blasio said.

"The crisis has laid bare so many things are broken in our city and our country," the mayor said.

Data broken down by zip code released by the city has shown that lower-income parts of New York City seemed to be the hardest hit by the virus. 19 of the 20 lowest concentrations of coronavirus cases hail from affluent zip codes, the New York Times reported.

Data also shows that minorities are also more likely to die from the coronavirus than other New Yorkers.

Hispanic New Yorkers make up 34 percent of the people to lose their lives to COVID-19, despite representing 29 percent of the population, and Black New Yorkers make up 28 percent of the fatalities despite representing 22 percent of the population, data show.

The "Fair Recovery Task Force" will come up with its preliminary roadmap by June 1, de Blasio said.

Here are its members:

• Patrick Gaspard, President of the Open Society Foundations
• Richard Ravitch, former lieutenant governor in New York
• Jennifer Jones Austin, CEO of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies
• Carl Weisbrod, former chair of City Planning Commission
• Henry Garrido, Executive Director of District Council 37
• Maria Torres-Springer, Vice President for US Programs at the Ford Foundation
• Liz Neumark, CEO of Great Performances
• Fred Wilson, leader of Computer Science For All initiative

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