Saturday, January 2, 2021

BLOG JERK OF THE YEAR AWARD GOES TO CHRIS CUOMO - MORE OF AN ASS THAN HIS CROOKED LAWYER BROTHER ANDREW CUOMO

 

2020 Man of the Year: Chris Cuomo

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Like most children born to famous politicians, Chris Cuomo is an unexceptional human being. His most notable accomplishment, if you can call it that, is not becoming a crack-addled sex maniac turned "artist" like Hunter Biden, his classmate at Yale Law School and a 2019 Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.

Cuomo isn't much of a journalist, either. Probably because he devotes most of his time and effort to a cause the media industry has declared verboten: being a Real Man.

In fact, it's hard to find an industry "norm" Cuomo hasn't dared to defy. He lifts weights. He's athletic. He's conventionally attractive, and so is his wife. He's aggro AF, and hates being a celebrity because it hinders his ability to beat the crap out of hecklers. Unlike many of his peers, he has yet to be credibly accused of sexual assault.

Cuomo laughs in the face of those who might question the "journalistic integrity" of cracking jokes on air with his older brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.), while a global pandemic decimates the state's nursing-home population.

He literally screams in the face of uptight cyclists who attempt to shame him for breaking quarantine and refusing to wear a mask after becoming one of the first media celebs to test positive for COVID-19. That alone would be enough to justify our decision to honor him as a Free Beacon Man of the Year in 2020.

"I don't want some jackass, loser, fat-tire biker being able to pull over and get in my space and talk bulls–t to me, I don't want to hear it," Cuomo raged on his SiriusXM radio show after being called out by the narc cyclist for visiting the site of his future mansion in East Hampton, N.Y.

After infecting his hot wife with the virus—wink wink—Cuomo made her feel important by giving her permission to blog about her feelings. The female Cuomo's treatment plan—including the "water-and-bleach bath" recommended by her "homeopathic physician"—came as a delight to equality advocates who have long argued that rich people are just as deranged as everyone else, if not more so.

Chris Cuomo might not be as cool as Hunter Biden, but his dedication to the cause of epic manhood is second to none. Congrats, bro! Tell your hot wife we said hello.

New York Halted Evictions. But What Happens When the Ban Ends?

A crisis looms in the pandemic’s wake: Evictions that threaten to overwhelm schools, homeless shelters and food pantries.

Diba Gaye is at risk of eviction after losing his job and spending rent money to pay for the funeral of his wife. 
Credit...Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

By Dana Rubinstein and Jazmine Hughes

When New York State lawmakers approved emergency legislation this week to ban evictions for at least two months, they were seeking to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from being forced from their homes during the winter, with the pandemic still raging. But they also feared something more perilous: a broad ripping at the fabric of society.

Families becoming homeless after being evicted, overwhelming shelters. Children haphazardly transferring schools and falling far behind. Lines at food pantries growing. People ending up in overcrowded housing, increasing their chances of developing chronic disease. During the outbreak, evictions have been associated with the spread of Covid-19.

And so the threat of eviction and subsequent hardships looms across the region. A school aide in Brooklyn who spent months in a homeless shelter is worried that she will lose her apartment and have to return to a shelter far from the doctors who treat her son’s heart condition.

A 65-year-old immigrant in East Harlem lost his wife in April and faces eviction after using his rent money to send her body back to Senegal. Since losing his job stocking groceries, he has bought food with his unemployment benefits.

North of New York City, an unemployed freight dispatcher moved into a mobile-home park, hopeful that her son would get a good education there. But now she is facing eviction, and she worries what that means for his schooling.

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For their part, landlords, especially those with only a few properties, are weathering their own crisis, with rental payments drying up but mortgages and utilities still to be paid.

The eviction moratorium will push some of those problems into the spring, when the pandemic is expected to recede as the pace of vaccinations increases. Many eviction proceedings will start up again on May 1, just weeks before the mayoral primary, one of the most consequential elections for New York City in memory.

As a result, the next mayor will have to grapple with the repercussions in a city already beset by widening income inequality and a local economy severely damaged by the pandemic. In New York State overall, as many 1.2 million households are at risk of eviction, according to Stout, a financial services consulting firm.

David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York, said that even before the pandemic, many New Yorkers were living paycheck to paycheck in unstable housing, spending half of their income on rent. Evictions will severely exacerbate the financial strain, he said.

The crisis, with its convergence of homelessness and joblessness, has the potential to replicate some of the worst elements of the Great Depression, he said.

“And that ripples down immediately,” he said.

Worse, Mr. Jones said, “those kinds of issues for New York could be long term.”

If tenants who are evicted can’t find alternate housing, they often double up in the homes of friends or family, or become homeless. More generally, evictions are associated with a spike in physical and mental health ailments and physical and sexual assault.

“For children, it’s particularly devastating,” said Emily A. Benfer, a visiting law professor at Wake Forest University. “It’s now in multiple studies associated with lead poisoning, it’s linked with severe academic decline at a time when children are falling so far behind, it increases food insecurity and it also derails their adulthood by increasing chronic disease.”

PAUL KRUGMAN: A deeper look at what’s on the mind of Paul Krugman, a world-class economist and opinion columnist.

Halima Abdul-Wahhab, 47, has two children, 19 and 3, and feared they would again be homeless when her landlord began eviction proceedings against her. She said her teenage son had a heart condition that makes him more vulnerable to coronavirus, and she wanted to remain close to the doctors who treat him near their Brooklyn apartment.

In December, her family’s eviction — and all-but-certain return to a homeless shelter — was narrowly avoided thanks to the unusual exertions of a nonprofit attorney and the office of her state senator, Zellnor Myrie. But the reprieve may be only temporary.

Ms. Abdul-Wahhab, who works as a school aide, said she is not sure how she would afford a new apartment.

“I’m at a job where I don’t make that much, but I just try to maintain as much as I can,” she said. “Rent is not the only thing that has to be paid every month.”

Since the pandemic hit, food pantries across the country have experienced record demand.

From January through November, the Food Bank for New York City distributed 70 percent more food, compared with the same period last year, said Matt Honeycutt, its chief development officer.

“Because that’s ultimately what folks are doing, all year long, without a pandemic,” he said. “They choose every month: Do I pay rent, do I buy medicine, do I keep the heat on, or do I buy food? Food is the first to get cut.” He added, “Those are impossible choices people have to make all the time — add a pandemic on that, and I don’t know how they do it.”

Nationally, as many as 14 million renter households are considered at risk of eviction. Were those evictions to proceed, the cost to social services would be more than $128.5 billion, according to a recent study by the University of Arizona and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

States have responded with a patchwork of eviction moratoriums and Covid-19-related hardship exemptions, but no state has fully tackled the issue of rent arrears, according to Professor Benfer. Nor is it clear that any state would be able to, given the fiscal distress that states and local government are experiencing.

New York City has an unusually sturdy social safety net, in part because City Hall has reached court settlements with advocacy groups. That includes a so-called right to shelter.

“The city has an obligation to shelter anyone who is homeless, and it’s expensive: over $3,000 per family, and $2,000 for a single person,” said Judith Goldiner, a Legal Aid Society attorney, citing the monthly expense. “Just that cost alone is huge for the city.”

The same is not necessarily true outside the city, where evictions could upend communities that have fewer rental protections and less assistance, tenant lawyers said.

In Sullivan County, north of New York City, Tiffany Caggiano, 25, lives with her partner and their 5-year-old son in a manufactured home. The owner of the land where the house sits is trying to evict her, and the holder of the mortgage on her home is trying to foreclose on her.

Both she and her partner lost their jobs just before the pandemic and have been unable to find steady work since. They survive on unemployment insurance and food pantries.

Ms. Caggiano said she moved there to get her son into a good school. He will enter kindergarten in the fall.

The boy dreams about a home with an upstairs, but if they were evicted, the county might put them in a hotel or transitional housing, according to their lawyers, because the county does not itself operate a homeless shelter. In the end, they could very well be left out in the cold.

“We would be in our car,” Ms. Caggiano said.

Legislators said this week that they had to do something. Brian Kavanagh, a Democratic state senator who represents Lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn, was the lead sponsor of the bill that bars landlords from evicting most tenants for 60 days in almost all cases.

“A policy that tells people they can’t go to work and therefore they can’t pay their rent, and then allows them to get evicted, and then pays for their shelter is just economically nonsensical, even if you don’t have a heart,” Mr. Kavanagh said.

The recent federal relief bill directed $25 billion in rent relief nationally, including $1.3 billion to New York State, but many experts doubt that will be enough to cover all the back rent that is owed. Both renters and landlords are calling for significantly more.

Many of those facing eviction, including East Harlem resident Diba Gaye, lost jobs during the pandemic. Mr. Gaye’s wife died of heart disease on April 11.

He remains in his apartment with his 21-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son, who both work part-time pharmacy jobs. But money remains tight. Mr. Gaye lost his job as a grocery store stocker and has been living on unemployment benefits that help him pay for food.

“I don’t want to lose my house too,” Mr. Gaye said.

ImageTiffany King is an unemployed hotel housekeeper who is on a rent strike. In May, evictions of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers could begin.
Credit...Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Many landlords don’t want to evict tenants either, said Michael A. Steiner, the lawyer for the landlord who began eviction proceedings against Mr. Gaye.

But with storefront and apartment tenants not paying rent, landlords are getting squeezed from both sides.

Both tenants and landlords are “going to need something from the government, whether it’s the federal government, state government or city government, something that enables the landlords to get paid and the tenants to pay money directly to the landlords,” he said.

John Bianco is the lawyer for the landlord that started eviction proceedings against Ms. Abdul-Wahhab, the school aide in Brooklyn. He said unpaid rent puts landlords in an unenviable spot, but that the goal of most eviction proceedings is not actually eviction.

“We’re debt collectors,” he said.

Still, some tenants said many landlords did not deserve sympathy, and have fought back with rent strikes.

Tiffany King, an unemployed hotel housekeeper, said she wants landlords to feel the trickle-down effect that comes with eviction.

She hasn’t paid rent in months, part of a rent strike that she and her neighbors are waging to protest lack of hot water, and what she describes as rampant mold.

“What tenants went through, now the landlords are going to have to go through,” Ms. King said. “They’re going to have to stand on line for help, or go into their savings. They don’t think about our health or how we want to live.”

Correction: 

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that the wife of Diba Gaye, a 65-year-old immigrant facing eviction, had died of Covid-19 in April, based on information that Mr. Gaye provided to The Times and to his lawyer. After the article was published, Mr. Gaye acknowledged to The Times and to his lawyer that his wife had died of heart disease, and had not contracted the coronavirus.

Dana Rubinstein is a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York City politics. Before joining The Times in 2020, she spent nine years at the publication now known as Politico New York. @danarubinstein



Virus Numbers Are Surging. Why Is New York’s Vaccine Rollout Sluggish?

With a new variant of the virus emerging elsewhere in the country, it’s crucial to vaccinate New Yorkers quickly. But so far, only about 88,000 have received the shots.

Virus numbers were soaring in New York City as 2020 came to a close.
Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

By Joseph Goldstein

As the final hours ticked away in a harrowing year, New York City on Thursday once again found itself in a worrying position in the pandemic: Hospitalizations were climbing for the fourth consecutive month, the positive test rate in some areas had doubled and vaccinations that were supposed to bring normalcy had gotten off to a slow start.

Across the city, where the positive test rate over a seven-day average reached 8.87, the virus continued its winter surge.

In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the positive test rate in the most recent seven-day average in one ZIP code had reached 14.71. A section of Ozone Park in Queens had a city-high 15.61 positive test rate. In the Bronx, the boroughwide rate had reached 9.56 — and yet that was still lower than Staten Island’s 10.34 rate.

In all, 49 ZIP codes in the city had a positive test rate of 10 or higher in the latest seven-day average, and the city has averaged nearly 4,000 cases and about 40 deaths a day.

So far the second wave has climbed more slowly and has not reached anywhere near the magnitude of New York City’s disastrous first wave in the spring — when more than 20,000 people died and 20 percent of city residents may have been infected. But public health experts say that there is urgent need to speed up the rollout of the vaccine to hasten the end of New York’s epidemic before hospitals are overwhelmed or a new and more contagious variant of the virus makes inroads.

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The variant, first identified in the United Kingdom and recently detected in Colorado and California, has not yet appeared in New York State, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Wednesday.

When the first vaccinations were given in New York earlier this month, doctors and nurses said they believed the end of the epidemic was in sight. But the pace of administering vaccinations has gone more slowly than anticipated in New York City.

Dr. Ronald Scott Braithwaite, a professor at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine who has been modeling New York City’s epidemic and is an adviser to the city, said that his team’s analysis suggested that once 10 to 20 percent of the city was vaccinated, the number of new cases would begin to drop — so long as social distancing and mask wearing remained constant and the new variant did not find a foothold in New York.

“If the new variant replaces the existing variant and we don’t vaccinate quickly, the second wave will start cresting again and will crest really high, and that’s something to take really seriously,” Dr. Braithwaite said.

ImageNursing home residents and staff are part of the Phase 1 of the vaccination rollout. 
Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

But achieving the goal of vaccinating 10 to 20 percent of the city is still a far way off. In the first 17 days of the vaccination rollout, about 88,140 people had received the first of two doses, the equivalent of about 1 percent of the city’s population. Those vaccinated so far have overwhelmingly been hospital employees, residents and workers at nursing homes and the staff at certain health clinics.

The pace is worrying some experts. “I do feel concern,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University. Despite months to prepare, there still seemed to be a steep learning curve when it comes to “the nitty-gritty of how do you get it from the freezer to the arm as quickly as possible,” she said. “I think there are growing pains as people are picking up how to do this.”

The first phase should have been the simplest, she added. “We’ve started out with the easiest populations, an almost captive audience: nursing homes and hospital workers — you know who they are and where to find them.”

CORONAVIRUS BRIEFING: An informed guide to the global outbreak, with the latest developments and expert advice.

For now, the vaccination effort does not resemble the sort of mass mobilization many imagined. New York City has yet to open any large vaccination sites. Instead, hospitals administered many of the first vaccinations to their employees. Hospitals have been encouraged to use each shipment of vaccines within a week, and the operation does not always have a race-against-the-clock feel.

The number of vaccinations plummets on weekends and all but stopped for Christmas Day, when more planes landed at Kennedy International Airport than vaccine doses were administered in New York City.

The vaccination program is now in its third week and has yet to accelerate dramatically, even as supply has begun to increase. More than 340,000 doses have been delivered to New York City so far.

On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city planned to have administered doses to one million people by the end of January. He has suggested that the state is acting as a bottleneck by not authorizing the city to open up vaccinations to larger categories of people yet.

“If we’re given the authorization, we can move very quickly,” Mr. de Blasio said this week. “We need the state guidance in terms of the categories of people, and the more that expands, the faster we can go.”

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The Bronx’s seven-day average positive rate has reached 9.56.
Credit...John Minchillo/Associated Press

State officials have expressed satisfaction with how the rollout is progressing, saying it makes sense to proceed with a few carefully delineated categories for now. “I’m not here to do 5 percent of the hospital and 5 percent of physicians and 5 percent of home care workers,” said Larry Schwartz, a member of Mr. Cuomo’s coronavirus task force who is overseeing the rollout. “We’re going down the line, and we’re only three weeks in.”

He added that the problem was the limited supply of the vaccine. “If we had a greater allocation, we probably would have gone to other group categories,” he said.

But already, there are growing complaints about fairness, with some doctors saying that hospital affiliation rather than risk has become decisive in determining who gets the vaccines.

Pediatricians who come into contact with Covid-19 patients daily have yet to be vaccinated for the most part if they do not work for a hospital. Yet some hospital employees who see fewer Covid-19 patients — such as radiologists — have been vaccinated.

“We feel forgotten,” said Dr. Kerry Fierstein, a pediatrician and chief executive of a company that runs pediatrician offices, mainly on Long Island and in New York City. “If you’re owned by a hospital, you’ve probably been vaccinated, but if you’re completely unaffiliated, you don’t know when you’ll get vaccinated.”

In recent weeks, the stakes have grown. The numbers across the state continue to rise, with concerning positive test rates in a seven-day average in the Mohawk Valley (9.5 percent), the Capital region (9.1) and the Finger Lakes (9.2) — and the new variant raises the risk that the epidemic could dramatically worsen in the weeks and months ahead.

The variant, known as B.1.1.7., is believed to be more than 50 percent more contagious. But surveillance of it is limited here. Less than half of a percent of confirmed virus cases in the United States are examined for variants, a far smaller fraction of cases than in a number of other countries, according to the Washington Post.

Mr. Cuomo said on Wednesday that more than 350 virus samples were recently tested for the new variant, and none were found to have it.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not here,” Mr. Schwartz said in an interview. “It doesn’t mean it is here.”

Despite the surge in cases and delays in the vaccine rollout, there is a bright spot for New York City: For the moment, hospitals are not in crisis.

Image
Cases are high on Staten Island, where Sary Quinones gave her daughter, Nyairah, 9, a Covid swab test.
Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock

With hospitalizations rising gradually — rather than suddenly, as happened in the spring — hospital systems have been better able to transfer patients to prevent any one facility from being overwhelmed.

The city’s public hospital system has moved around about 100 patients, mainly out of harder-hit hospitals in the Bronx and South Brooklyn and more recently Harlem, Dr. Mitchell Katz, head of the city’s hospital system, said.

“As long as the numbers keep drifting upwards, but not jumping, I’ll be fine,” Dr. Katz said. Intensive-care units in the city’s public hospitals were at 70 percent occupancy levels, he said.

Earlier in the month, Dr. Braithwaite thought it might take a shutdown of two or four weeks to prevent rising cases from overwhelming the health care system. But over the last few weeks, the case counts have climbed relatively slowly, with each case seeding about 1.2 new cases, he said. That is far below the more dire predictions he was considering at the start of winter.

“It’s simmering along,” he said of New York City’s epidemic.

Things could change if the new variant begins to speed up infections.

“That’s a reason to vaccinate really, really quickly,” Dr. Braithwaite said.

Yet if the spread continues at its current pace, some public health experts say that vaccinations might begin to bring New York’s epidemic under control before hospitals are overwhelmed — even without any additional government restrictions or stay-at-home orders. And neither Mr. Cuomo or Mr. de Blasio has shown much appetite for a full shutdown.

Dr. Jessica Justman, an infectious disease expert and epidemiology professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said that the gradual increase of cases in recent months reflects the high level of social distancing and mask wearing in New York City.

“You could argue that the second wave represents a flattening of the curve,” she said, “that all the social distancing and mask wearing are doing what it’s intended to do: flattening the curve so the health care system isn’t overwhelmed.”

Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York, following years of criminal justice and police reporting for the Metro desk. He also spent a year reporting on Afghanistan from The Times’s Kabul bureau.  @JoeKGoldstein

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 1, 2021, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: De Blasio Aims to Vaccinate 1 Million in January. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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