New York City’s entire public school system closed on 19th November signaling that a second wave of the coronavirus has arrived.
At a news conference, the Mayor Bill de Blasio said that it was a temporary situation but reopening might not take place until next month or later.He declared that “our schools will be back.”
The Mayor said the city’s 1,800 public schools would revert to remote learning beginning Thursday after the Big Apple recorded a seven-day average positivity rate of three percent.
The closure pointed to the start of an alarming new phase of New York battle against the coronavirus and the mayor and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo both indicated on Wednesday that further restrictions to public life “were coming, and coming soon,” as Mr. de Blasio put it. Limited indoor dining and gyms have been open for under two months.
New York Times stated that the return of schoolchildren to classrooms had been a ray of normalcy in a dark time for the city, with theaters still shut, many offices vacant and the mass transit system facing the threat of deep service cuts if federal aid does not arrive soon.
“Our schools have opened and have been remarkably safe,” the schools chancellor Richard A. Carranza said Wednesday.
The mayor and the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, have faced intense criticism as the 3 percent closure threshold drew nearer.
The city has recently struggled to tamp down the surge that is spiraling out of control across so much of the country.
America has now registered 250,426 fatalities, the highest reported national death toll according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University.