Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you. So, let me do one more topic here and it plays right off of that. And it's about the fact that in this really painful difficult year 2020 people created. People created things that they didn't think of before that they didn't even know they could do before. We saw incredible strength. We saw incredible cooperation. We saw incredible ingenuity all over the city – our health care heroes, of course; the way small businesses helped each other out; so many people came forward in a spirit of charity and supported their fellow New Yorkers. That's what we've seen throughout 2020. That's what gives me so much faith in 2021, and the years beyond, the way New Yorkers handled 2020 really tells you everything you need to know about our people and our city. We also innovated right here at City Hall. We talked about the Open Storefronts program – obviously, Open Restaurants, Open Streets, whole new ways of doing things and there's got to be a lot more like that, going forward, because we found in crisis solutions that, ideally, we would've figured out when there wasn't a crisis, but the crisis gave us that transformative moment to do something different and better, and we need to build upon it. We also found new ways to deepen our commitment, to protecting our people. And in this crisis, we know so many people were trying to figure out a way to keep things going, find a way to keep their employment going, find a way to get around that they felt was safe. More and more people of course turned to cycling as an option, and one of the things that we focused on this year was creating protected bike lanes to really ensure that New Yorkers could cycle about the city in the safest way possible. I'm happy to tell you, we have a record number of new protected bike lanes this year. This year, in all five boroughs, we built 28 miles of protected bike lanes. That is just in the year 2020. And now, with that achievement, combining with what was done previously, 133 miles of protected bike lanes that we've built in the last seven years of this administration.
So, this city continues to evolve and change. There's so much that we can do to make it a better city going forward. And we're going to be talking a lot about this in the coming weeks, the future of New York City. Again, we're not going back to a status quo, we are going forward to something better, something more sustainable, something more inclusive, something that will really help this city to grow together. That's what we'll be focused on as we enter into 2021 and this city rebuilds and recovers.
With that, let me turn to our indicators for the day. And I want to say up front, indicators are a little unusual because we, obviously, had different patterns of testing because of the holidays. So, the numbers – got a caution from Department of Health, we should take these numbers with a grain of salt, because they don't necessarily reflect the same trends as when we see more regular testing. But let me go over the numbers. Number one, daily number of people admitted to New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19 – today's report, 182 patients. Again, we want to be under 200, so I'm glad it's under 200. I want to drive that number down a lot. And here's another reason why – hospitalization rate per 100,000 people, 3.93 percent. Very much too high, we want to get that under two – I should say three [inaudible] 3.93 people per 100,000. We want to get that under two. Number two, daily number of cases for COVID-19 on the seven-day average – today's number, 3,390 – very high number. We want to get under 550 – obviously, a long way to go to bring that back. And number three, current testing indicator and seven-day rolling average, again, affected by the unusual testing patterns last few days, but 7.45 percent is the number. The goal is to get back under five percent and go lower again.
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Two weeks after election day November 3, 2020 COVID-19 indicators began rise, and have risen to levels that the mayor spoke of another shut down of New York City again. Knowing the rising COVID-19 indicators due to overcrowding outside and inside poll sites Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio allowed a special election to take place in the 12th City Council District. We have been told that at least four Board of Elections workers have come down with COVID-19 due to the special election, and it is not known how many voters in the 12th City Council District were exposed to COVID-19, including the Bronx Democratic Party Leader and New York State Assembly Speaker who both reside in the 12th City Council District who both went to their poll sites to vote.
Comes the new year there will be two vacancies in the 11th and 15th Bronx City Council Districts where Mayor de Blasio will be calling special elections to fill those vacant city council seats. As was the case in early 2020 where Governor Cuomo postponed two special elections to the June 2020 Primary date, the governor must also postpone these two special elections to the June 2021 Primary date.
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