Bill De Blasio Causes Outrage: Claims Another Lockdown Could Be Set In Place Right After Christmas

OPINION | This article contains commentary that reflects the author's opinion.

Bill de Blasio said that another New York City shutdown can be expected after Christmas, according to Fox News.

“Clearly these numbers I went over a moment ago, they’re going in the wrong direction.”

“We are just on the verge of a huge breakthrough with a vaccine, but we’re also dealing with a second wave.”

“We’ve got to beat it back, we got to protect lives, we got to protect our hospitals.”

“So I think, unfortunately, and I don’t say it with anything but sorrow, but I do think it’s needed, we’re going to need to do some kind of shutdown in the weeks ahead, something that resembles the pause we were in in the spring.”

“If we implement that with some good luck and hard work and with the vaccine starting to help us we could be out of that in a matter of weeks, but having stopped the worst of this surge.”

Dr. David Nabarro warned that lockdowns should not be the primary way of fighting the pandemic.

Nabarro said it makes “poor people an awful lot poorer.”

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

“If you extrapolate out at this rate of growth, you could be looking at the shutdown of New York City within a month,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.

De Blasio was asked if schools would also shut down.

“Our schools are the safest places in New York City right now, our health care leaders have said it,” de Blasio said.

From Fox News:

De Blasio had announced that there had been 160 hospitalizations on Sunday, below the city’s 200 threshold. But the seven-day hospitalization rate was 2.89 per 100,000 people – above the 2.0 threshold. Meanwhile, there was a 5.51% positivity rate (seven-day average) and 2,813 cases; the city wants to be below 5% and 500 cases a day.