New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday he is resisting closing schools in the nation’s largest city in the face of the burgeoning coronavirus outbreak — fearing if there is a closure it could last even through the calendar year.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” de Blasio defended his keeping the schools open despite a clamor from teachers and parents to close them down.
“Even if our school system shuts down, if it happened, we would try and keep it brief,” he said. “My blunt fear is if schools shut down, they will be done for the year, for the school year, maybe even for the calendar year.
“So I'm very reticent to shut down schools for a variety of reasons, not just because that's where a lot of kids get their own good meals, where they get adult supervision… there's health and safety ramifications to that. We need health care workers desperately. it is literally a day by day reality. If at any point we feel it doesn't make sense to keep our schools open, we'll make a move."
He added “every option on the table” for a lockdown in the city that never sleeps — including closing restaurants and bars.
“We've never seen anything like this, let's be clear,” he said. “This is a crisis that will be with us, first of all, I believe at least six months. It's unlike anything we've dealt with in our memory. It's changing every hour. So we're going to constantly make new decisions.”
He said the city “had 25 confirmed cases on Monday. We have 269 this morning. And that number is going to grow today.”
“We're going to clearly have 1,000 cases at some point next week, probably not even too far into next week,” he added.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.