STAY UP TO DATE WITH THE LATEST NEWS AT BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2020 12 pages • Vol.Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint 43, No. 13 • March 27–April 2, 2020
‘WE ARE THE EPICENTER’ As Brooklynites lock down indoors, coronavirus cases continue to skyrocket
Brooklyn’s tally
now over 4,000 By Rose Adams
Brooklyn Paper
The mayor’s office abruptly
closed most coronavirus testing
centers on March 20 — but failed
to notify many local officials and
hospital workers, confusing and
frustrating locals.
“They didn’t give us any detail,”
Photo by Todd Maisel
Carroll Gardens teen offers grocery runs for the at-risk amid COVID-19 fears
MORE ON THE CORONAVIRUS
Barber shops, tattoo parlors, salons shutter PAGE 3
Case at Brooklyn prison sparks alarm PAGE 6
Storied pizza shop introduces delivery PAGE 6
Nets all-star donates for coronavirus relief PAGE 7
Distilleries now producing hand sanitizer PAGE 7
Coney Island postpones openings PAGE 8
Volunteers to make face masks PAGE 8
STAY INFORMED. Get daily updates by signing up for
email newsletters at: BrooklynPaper.com/updates
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A Carroll Gardens high
schooler is offering to deliver
groceries to help local old-timers
avoid crowds amid the coronavirus
pandemic.
“This seems like the best I can
do with my abilities, because the
grocery stores have been really
crazy with everybody stockpiling,”
said Maeve Foley. “I think
it’s really scary for senior citizens
navigating that kind of environment.”
The charitable 17-year-old has
posted flyers this week around
the brownstone neighborhood, offering
to pick up and deliver on
Sunday mornings for anyone 65
years of age or older.
“I’ll stop by whatever grocery
store they want me to,” she said.
Foley said she’s already had
other do-gooders reach out to
help her with the project.
“Some other young, able-bodied
people have taken down my
number and we’re going to be in
contact depending on how many
people we get,” she said.
In order to prevent further
spread of COVID-19 while doing
her deliveries, the youngster
will take several precautions
against the highly-contagious respiratory
illness, like wearing a
face mask and gloves, and sanitizing
her equipment in between
deliveries.
The senior’s school in Manhattan
shut down last week due
to the virus and she was eager to
do her part to make life easier for
her neighbors during the outbreak,
which has swept the city and has
largely shut down or limited businesses
in the borough.
She has not received any calls
from senior citizens yet, but she
hopes that her efforts will help
the nabe’s most vulnerable.
“I think with something like
this it’s really hard to know how
to help, especially when we’re
all supposed to be quarantining,”
she said. “There are a lot
of older people in my neighborhood
and we’ve been wanting to
help them out.”
Test sites close as
supplies dwindle
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A Greenpointer has launched
an online fundraiser to support delivery
cyclists putting their life on
the line to pedal meals to homebound
Brooklynites amid a surge
in demand due to the novel coronavirus.
“They’re in many ways on
the forefront of this as a public
health crisis both for themselves
in terms of not getting sick as well
as spreading it,” said Cathasach
O’Neill, who works as a delivery
biker for a wine store.
The northern Brooklynite said
that the demand has skyrocketed
during the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Everybody talks about medical
suppliers but they don’t look at
the many other jobs out there that
need supplies and information,”
they said.
O’Neill’s GoFundMe page aims
to collect money to buy supplies for
the workers, like hand sanitizer, facemasks,
gloves, and cleaning materials
to sterilize their equipment
— although the cyclist worries that
shortages might make many of those
things difficult to come by.
“We still need to figure out
a source for all of this stuff, we
don’t know where to get masks,”
O’Neill said.
The two-wheeled meal couriers
are highly vulnerable to falling
through the cracks because many of
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
They’re going virtual!
Brooklyn Public Library has
moved several of its community
services to the web since it closed
all branches March 20 to curtail
the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Staff at the borough book lender
have worked tirelessly during the
last couple of days to continue offering
their many free programs
to Brooklynites via their computers,
such as story time for kids,
creative writing contests, gaming
sessions, and career services, according
to a spokeswoman.
“An amazing team came together
to make this all work to make this
happen under the circumstances
that we have,” said Fritzi Bodenheimer.
Librarians have started recording
children’s story time with their
phones from their living room couch
and broadcasting it live on the library’s
Facebook page.
“All the story times are being
done on the fly,” Bodenheimer
said. “It’s been heartwarming.”
The workers have replaced their
usual face-to-face career guidance
and resume help with an email
service, which should come in
especially handy during a time
Photo by Ben Verde
when many people are looking
for a new job due to businesses
closing down.
If you’re looking to dive into a
treasure trove of historical Brooklyn
newspapers dating back as far as
1835, book bigwigs have made their
virtual newsstand available outside
the library for the first time.
The organization will also host
regular creative writing workshops
for teens through social media,
posting short writing prompts on
their Instagram page.
The library will also continue
to offer their previously-available
online services, including e-books,
language learning programs, practice
for standardized school exams,
and librarian book recommendations,
offering Kings Countians
a heap of educational resources
while remaining indoors, according
to Bodenheimer.
said Eddie Mark, the district
manager of Community Board
13, which services Coney Island,
Gravesend, and Brighton Beach.
“There’s nobody that we know of
that we can call.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced
on March 20 that the city would
close all appointment-only coronavirus
testing facilities citywide,
citing a critical shortage of protective
gear, such as gloves and face
masks, for hospital staff. Hizzoner
clarified two days later that testing
would continue at tent facilities
erected outside public hospitals
— but only for patients in
need of hospitalization.
The change in protocol came
only hours after two testing sites
opened their doors at Coney Island
Hospital and the Ida G. Israel
Community Health Center. A
third testing site at Coney Island’s
MCU Park, which is still under
construction, will test overflow
emergency room patients from
Coney Island Hospital once it’s
completed, officials said.
Prior to the facilities’ closure,
residents had been told they could
make appointments at the testing
centers by calling the New York
City Health and Hospitals hotline,
where a clinician would evaluate
their symptoms.
However, when residents called
the hotline on March 21 — after the
change in protocol — clinicians told
them that they had never heard of
either testing site and did not listen
to their symptoms.
The response confused and frustrated
callers, who simply wanted
to know how to get tested.
“I was on the phone for eight
hours over two days,” said Nicole, a
Midwood resident who said she experienced
fever and coughing, and
feared she could infect her elderly
mother who suffers from cancer.
Nicole said she called the hotline
to make an appointment, but after
waiting for 45 minutes on hold, a
pre-screener told her, “I’m sorry, I
don’t know why you’re calling this
number. We just give out general
information.”
The screener eventually transferred
Nicole to a doctor, but the
doctor did not listen to Nicole’s
symptoms and simply told her to
go to the hospital if she “felt ill,”
she said.
Testing centers had promised to test people for the virus, but a shortage in tests forced
medical centers to turn people away.
“She just repeated the same
mantra, like she was reading from
a script,” Nicole said. “They’re
explicitly instructed to get rid of
as many phone calls as possible,”
she speculated.
Because many local officials
and even hospital staff did not
know that the testing sites had
closed, they redirected confused
callers back to the same hotline to
schedule an appointment. As of
March 24, receptionists at Coney
Island Hospital were still telling
callers to call the hotline.
Nicole decided to visit a CityMD
instead, where she was
able to get tested for free with
her insurance. (The test costs
$200 without insurance.) The
CityMD doctor told Nicole that
her symptoms, her exposure to a
confirmed coronavirus patient,
and her close proximity to her atrisk
mother make her a textbook
coronavirus case, she said.
“The fact that I was able with
such ease to go somewhere else,
that says to me that their system
is the one failing,” said Nicole,
who, as of the afternoon on afternoon
March 24, is still awaiting
her test results.
Mark, of Community Board
13, said that the state’s ability to
turn the Javits Center in Manhattan
into a testing complex indicates
that there must be enough
resources for a similar center in
Brooklyn.
“They’re setting that up, but what
about Brooklyn?” said Mark.
Offering seniors a helping hand
Maeve Foley, 17, wants to help her older neighbors during
the coronavirus outbreak.
Photo by Kevin Duggan
Greenpointer launches fundraiser to support bike deliverers
them are immigrant workers, some
of whom are undocumented, O’Neill
added. The do-gooder hopes the initiative
will also push city officials
to offer information about the virus
in more languages than English
and Spanish, stressing that Chinese
is many bike-bound workers’
first language.
O’Neill also hopes that cyclists —
many of whom do not receive benefits
from the app companies they
deliver for — don’t burn themselves
out trying to meet demand.
“Other businesses are becoming
worried that they don’t have
delivery riders. At some point exhaustion
is going to be a real problem,”
they said. “There’s only so
many delivery workers.”
Due to the long, strenuous
hours, many of the riders ride ebikes,
which are illegal on the city’s
streets.
Mayor Bill de Blasio directed
police to stop cracking down on
e-bike delivery workers on March
16 after local pols and advocates
demanded cops stop issuing tickets
and seizing vehicles, Streetsblog
reported.
Albany legislators might legalize
e-bikes as part of the state budget,
but one immigrants rights activist
said that pols need to immediately
lift the ban on the bikes and support
the carriers.
“Right now, it’s important the
state immediately pass the e-bike
legalization bill so they won’t be
criminalized for doing their urgent
work, and that both the state and
city provide immediate support to
make sure they stay healthy and supported,”
said Angelis Solis of Make
the Road New York, an organization
working to aid immigrant and
working class communities.
Vulnerable food transporters are still working
Food delivery has surged
during the outbreak.
Brooklyn libraries now open — online!
By Ben Verde
Brooklyn Paper
Confirmed cases of the novel
coronavirus in Kings County shot
into the thousands this week, as
New York City has become the
epicenter of the outbreak in the
United States.
Out of over 17,000 cases within
the five boroughs, over 4,000 are in
Brooklyn, which is second only to
Queens in the number of confirmed
cases per borough. Citywide, over
200 people have been killed.
Fifty-eight percent of the cases
within New York State are in New
York City, and one-third of cases
nationwide are in the state.
“I don’t want to be the epicenter,
but we are the epicenter,” Mayor
Bill de Blasio said at a briefing
on March 24.
Statewide, officials say they
are unprepared for the massive
swell of cases all at once, and that
the rate of infection is doubling
roughly every three days.
“We haven’t flattened the
curve,” Governor Andrew Cuomo
said March 24. “And the curve is
actually increasing.”
Local officials’ pleas to the federal
government have grown more
urgent day by day — and have started
to see small results, such as the delivery
of 4,000 badly needed respirators
to New York State, 2,000 of
which will go to New York City.
Mayor de Blasio cautioned
that this was still nowhere near
the amount the city would need
to weather the storm and that city
hospitals could run out of essential
supplies such as ventilators
within a week.
“That is the difference between
someone who is suffering in one
of our hospitals who might make
it if they have access to a ventilator
— but if we can’t have them on
the ventilator at the right time we
could lose a lot of lives,” the mayor
said on “Fox and Friends.”
While the state has begun work
to install a thousand hospital beds
in Manhattan’s Javits Center — no
plans for temporary hospital expansions
have been announced for
Kings County other than the leasing
of existing beds at the Brooklyn
Center for Rehabilitation and
Residential Health Care, despite
its high number of cases, with officials
calls for the repurposing
of the boroughs available unused
spaces so far going ignored.
“I was surprised and disheartened
that not a single site identified
by the state was in Brooklyn,”
Borough President Eric Adams
said in a statement.
/BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
/BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
/Vol.Se
/updates