By: Jim McFeeney
Hotels rooms are empty, while subway cars are jammed. Something isn’t adding up.
A quarter of hotels in New York City hotels that had been slated as facilities to handle patients who had been suffering from the coronavirus still sit empty and unused. At the same time, subway trains are filled with homeless people – many potentially infected.
In addition, in what has caused a furor from coast to coast, local nursing homes have been strong-armed into taking those who are getting over the virus, thereby endangering other residents.
“As of 4 a.m. Monday, the LaGuardia Plaza Hotel in Queens had 10 occupants and the Aloft next to it had 11 while a Hampton Inn and a Hilton Garden Inn in undisclosed locations in the city had no guests, according to a NYC Health + Hospitals document viewed by The Post,” the newspaper reported. All told, those hotels had only 21 occupants for nearly 1,100 rooms, according to the document.
“It’s infuriating and morally disgusting,” Annie Caraforo, an activist with Neighbors Together, a Brooklyn social services and advocacy group, told the Post. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and we need to be taking all of the safety precautions we can to make sure people can safely socially isolate and keep themselves healthy.”
A national outcry has arisen because New York’s leaders vastly over-estimate the damage they thought would be caused by the pandemic. The USNS Comfort hospital ship “holds fewer than 80 patients in New York City, leaving nearly 90% of its available space unused after its emergency dispatch to the U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus crisis,” said CNBC. “Shortly after arriving from its home port in Norfolk, Virginia, the military’s floating lifesaver was adjusted to receive coronavirus patients, halving its 1,000-bed capacity.” As of mid-April, only 71 of the USNS Comfort’s 500 beds were occupied.
The situation has not gone unnoticed in the halls of power in upstate Albany, At one of his televised daily briefings, Cuomo showed the gathered reporters and television cameras a photo splashed across the front page of The Daily News of the homeless crammed into train cars. “That is disgusting, what is happening on those subway cars,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not even safe for the homeless people to be on trains,” he added. “No face masks, you have this whole outbreak, we’re concerned about homeless people, so we let them stay on the trains without protection in this epidemic of the Covid virus? No. We have to do better than that, and we will.”
