De Blasio joins Cuomo in criticizing stimulus deal.
State and city officials in New York had hoped that Congress would soften the blow of the pandemic on household budgets and government coffers with a $2 trillion stimulus package that was expected to be approved this week.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said the deal's benefits for New York included over $40 billion in unemployment insurance, grants for hospitals and much-needed funding for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose ridership had plummeted.
But Mr. Cuomo complained on Wednesday that the package was "terrible" for New York. He said that only $3.1 billion was earmarked to help the state with its budget gap, a sum his office said was disproportionately low compared with what states with fewer confirmed cases and with smaller budgets were in line to get.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking at a news briefing later on Wednesday, went further, calling the deal "immoral." Mr. de Blasio said New York City would be getting only $1 billion, despite having one-third of the country's virus cases. He said he planned to appeal directly to President Trump, a native New Yorker, to "fix this situation."
"It should have been one of the easiest no-brainers in the world for the U.S. Senate to include real money for New York City and New York State in this stimulus bill, and yet it didn't happen," Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said, putting the blame on Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader.
Mayor debunks the idea of returning to normal in April.
Mr. de Blasio continued to emphasize on Wednesday how urgently the city needed supplies to cope with the crush of new cases. He said he appreciated the assistance the federal government had committed to providing, but that more was required. And he again called for the U.S. military to get more directly involved and in a much bigger way.
The mayor warned New Yorkers to relinquish any hope of a return to normal life by April, rejecting the president's comments this week that he wanted the economy to reopen by Easter. City residents should prepare for the possibility that conditions could worsen in May, he said.
Citing various projections, the mayor said at least half of all New Yorkers could contract the virus, an estimate similar to those that officials have given in California. But Mr. de Blasio noted that for 80 percent of those who were infected, it would be "a very limited experience."
The mayor also said that New Yorkers were "overwhelmingly" following social-distancing guidelines, but that there were exceptions. To address one of those, he said, the city would remove hoops from 80 of the city's 1,700 basketball courts where pickup games were still being played.
With big hotels closing, one offers rooms to health care workers.
With most of the big hotels in New York City either closed or making plans to close, some are offering to house doctors, nurses and other workers on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus.
On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Twitter that the high-end Four Seasons hotel on East 57th Street, which closed temporarily last week with hopes of reopening in late April, would provide free accommodations to "medical personnel currently working to respond" to the pandemic.
The Four Seasons, which is owned by the Beanie Babies founder Ty Warner, was "the first of many hotels we hope will make their rooms available," Mr. Cuomo said.
There is an abundance of rooms that could be made available. A list circulating among hotel industry officials shows that hotels that have closed their doors or plan to contain more than 30,000 rooms.
The list contains some of the city's biggest and best-known, including the Grand Hyatt, the New Yorker, the Ritz Carlton, the Pierre, the Plaza and the St. Regis. Most have given notice to the main union of hotel workers in the city, the Hotel Trades Council, that they plan to reopen from mid-April to late June.
Reporting was contributed by Jonah Engel Bromwich, Michael Gold, Joseph Goldstein, Matthew Haag Nicole Hong, Patrick McGeehan, Andy Newman, Brian M. Rosenthal, Michael Rothfeld, Somini Sengupta, Nikita Stewart, Tracey Tully and Ali Watkins.
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