N.Y. Has Only 6 Days ’Supply of Ventilators, Cuomo Says: Live Updates – The New York Times, Nytimes.com

“You can create your own version, ”Mr. de Blasio said. “You can be creative and put whatever decoration you want on it. It can be as homemade as you want. But that’s what we want you to do: something homemade. ”

The mayor and the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, repeatedly said that the city and state’s social distancing guidelines continued to apply.

“These face coverings shouldn’t be seen as an invitation to come closer,” Dr. Barbot said.

Mr. de Blasio said that city officials were offering the new guidance because they were considered concerned that apparently healthy people who did not have virus symptoms could be spreading infection regardless.

The Trump administration is expected to announce that all Americans should wear cloth masks or other face coverings if they go out in public, based on a forthcoming recommendation from the centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The announcement would be a shift in federal guidance amid new concerns that the coronavirus is being spread by infected people who show no symptoms .

Until now, the CDC, like the World Health Organization, has advised that ordinary people need not wear masks unless they are sick and coughing, partly to preserve medical-grade masks for health care workers who desperately need them.

Four NJ cities enact strict lockdown measures.

Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark announced Thursday that his city and three neighboring New Jersey communities were enacting aggressive measures to slow the spread of the virus.

In “Operation Lockdown,” as the effort is called, police will patrol the borders between Newark, Orange, East Orange and Irvington, and other areas , to reduce traffic between the four cities.

Other patrols are focused on breaking up gatherings outside stores, in parks and on corners. Violators will face summonses and legal action, Mr. Baraka said. The crackdown will last seven days and could be extended.

Mr. Baraka said in a statement that people traveling back and forth between the cities, which are all in Essex County, were “making all of our neighborhoods unsafe, so we are going to have the police from our individual communities patrolling the borders to keep them from entering. ”

From Monday night into Tuesday morning in Newark, the authorities issued (summonses and closed 23 businesses, the State Police said. The next night, the police issued summonses and closed five businesses.

There were 2, (confirmed cases of the virus and 182 deaths in Essex County as of Thursday. Only Bergen County, the state’s most populous county, had more.

New Jersey’s death toll doubled in two days.

With 250 new deaths since Wednesday, New Jersey’s death toll from the virus more than doubled, to 728, in two days, Gov. Phil Murphy said on Thursday.

“I know these numbers are stark,” he said. “They are certainly sobering.”

With more deaths in New York State and 58 deaths in Connecticut reported on Thursday, the toll for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut stood at 3, 31.

New Jersey now has over 42, 06 confirmed virus cases, with 3, people testing positi ve since Wednesday, the governor said.

Mr. Murphy spoke after touring a – bed field hospital at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus that is to open on Monday. The state is building similar hospitals in Edison and Atlantic City.

Mr. Murphy also said he had signed an executive order authorizing the State Police to commandeer medical supplies.

And he noted that six people in the state had been criminally charged with assaulting law enforcement officers by spitting or coughing on them and claiming to have the virus. Offenders face fines of up to $ 18, 06 and up to months in jail.

NYC public schools report the first virus death of a teacher.

New York City recorded its first coronavirus-related death of a public -school teacher this week after a third-grade teacher at Public School 9 in Brooklyn died late Tuesday, officials said.

“This is a tragedy for the PS 9 students, staff and the entire school community, ”the school’s principal, Fatimah Ali, wrote in a message to parents and students about the death of the teacher, Sandra Santos-Vizcaino.

Ms. Santos-Vizcaino’s current and former students and colleagues shared memories of her on a (tribute page) .

“No one could make me happy the way you did,” one student wrote. “I can’t imagine passing her room and not seeing her there or not even being able to ask her a question. This is all too surreal, ”wrote Deirdre Levy, a fellow teacher at the school.

Ms. Santos-Vizcaino’s death was not the Department of Education’s first virus-related fatality. Dez-Ann Romain, the principal of the Brooklyn Democracy Academy, died last month after becoming infected with the virus.

With 1.1 million students and over , 10 teachers, the city’s public school system is the largest in the United States. Mayor Bill de Blasio closed the schools on March under mounting pressure from parents and educators.

Tekashi is freed from prison because of virus risk.

. Tekashi 90, who was born Daniel Hernandez, will instead complete his sentence under home confinement, his lawyer, Lance Lazzaro, said.

Mr. Hernandez, 26, who is also known as 6ix9ine, pleaded guilty last year to a series of gang robberies and shootings and cooperated with federal prosecutors by testifying against his former associates in the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods gang. He has asthma, which, his lawyer argued, increased his risk of becoming infected with the virus.

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Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who sentenced Tekashi 95, agreed.

Mr. Lazzaro said that the rapper had been treated for shortness of breath in the past week, but that he was feeling better.

A Sing Sing inmate is the first state prisoner to die after getting the virus.

An inmate at the Sing Sing Correctional facility north of New York City This week died after contracting the coronavirus, the first-virus-related death in the state prison system, officials confirmed on Thursday.

The inmate, Juan R. Mosquero, , tested positive for the virus and did not appear to have any pre-existing health conditions, according to an employee at the Westchester County Medical Examiner’s Office, which conducted an autopsy.

He was not hospitalized when he died, said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Mr. Mosquero was serving a sentence of up to 58 years in prison after being convicted in Queens in on charges of first-degree criminal sexual act and first-degree sexual conduct against a child, according to the state corrections department.

He is one of 31 inmates in New York’s prison system to have been infected with the virus, officials said. There about 83, (prisoners in the state’s prisons. As of Thursday, 350 staff members had tested positive for the virus.

Mr. Mosquero’s death will be reviewed by the State Commission on Correction, which oversees the state’s prisons.

Anthony Annucci, the state’s acting corrections commissioner declined an interview request on Thursday.

He said in a statement that because of the outbreak, the department had suspended “visitation early on, eliminated intake and transfers of individuals throughout the system, distributed hand sanitizer in common areas, and have been dogged in our identification of symptomatic staff and incarcerated individuals. ”

Prison officials have not identified which facilities have virus cases, but an official with the corrections officers’ union said Bedford , Clinton, Marcy, Sing Sing and Wende and Bedford were among the prisons where the virus had been detected.

A prisoners’ advocacy group on Thursday called for Mr. Cuomo to release prisoners who are at increased risk of becoming infected with the virus because they older or have compromised immune systems.

“We knew people were going to die,” Dave George, associate director of the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign and Parole Preparation Project said in a statement. “We knew people were going to die. The governor must immediately grant clemencies to thousands of incarcerated New Yorkers before more deaths occur in his state prisons. ”

Reporting was contributed by Kevin Armstrong, Anne Barnard, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Nancy Coleman, Alan Feuer, Michael Gold, Virginia Heffernan, Corey Kilgannon, Adam Liptak, Andy Newman, Jan Ransom, Melena Ryzik, Andrea Salcedo, Nate Schweber, Eliza Shapiro, Matt Stevens and Michael Wilson.