De Blasio, Asked About His Urging New Yorkers to Go out During Early Stage of Coronavirus, Pivots to Attacking Federal Gov’t

EXCERPT:

DE BLASIO: “You know, Willie, we’re all trying to make sense of something we’ve never dealt with before. Every single day. Look, this city, I gave the order to close the restaurants and bars. Obviously, that was — we were one of the first places to do it. I called for shelter-in-place right after San Francisco did it. I give them great credit. Mayor Breed did something important there. I called for it immediately after. We were one of the first places in the country to do that. There’s always going to be questions about, you know, did we get all the information we needed? Did we act on it? I did my best. I think all decision-makers are doing their best. But this isn’t even the issue now. The issue now is we’re about to go into the hard part, and this is where we really have the opportunity to save lives. Think about it this way, Willie, and I’ve had this conversation with our health care leadership. They can project, right now, the number of cases that we’re expecting next week. They could project, right now, how many ventilators we need, how many doctors, how many nurses. And we know we don’t have all of that for next week, despite constant pleas to Washington.“