New York cancels LGBTQ Pride March on its 50th anniversary
‘When this is all over, I want people to say, we went through hell but we learned lessons and we built a better society because of it’
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Your support makes all the difference.The 50th anniversary of the New York LGBT+ Pride Parade has become a major casualty of the city’s coronavirus response as public events are shut down to June.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Monday that the Pride, National Puerto Rican Day, and the Celebrate Israel parades were among the June events to be cancelled or postponed as the city fights the pandemic.
“They will be back, and we will find the right way to do it,” Mr de Blasio said.
Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mr de Blasio said it was not clear when events could begin again in New York.
“To be able to come back you need testing to be, in our city, probably hundreds of thousands of tests a day,” he said.
“You need temperature checks going into workplaces. You need all sorts of things to make sure that anyone who’s sick is immediately isolated and supported in quarantine.”
New York governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted on Monday the state was “going through hell”.
“When this is all over, I want people to say, we went through hell but we learned lessons and we built a better society because of it,” he said.
On Sunday, 478 lives were lost in New York due to the coronavirus. With 17,671 deaths in total, New York State is the epicentre of the United States’ 775,846 cases and 41,302 deaths.
Mr Cuomo is calling for hazard pay plus a 50 per cent bonus for essential workers, saying they didn’t have the luxury of staying at home.
“All of those essential workers, who have had to get up every morning to put food on the shelves, and go to the hospitals to provide health care under extraordinary circumstances ... those people worked. They exposed themselves to the virus,” Mr Cuomo said.
Mr Cuomo has extended the state lockdown to May 15, while New York City schools will be closed for the rest of the school year. The Department of Education has confirmed 63 employees, including 25 teachers, have died of Covid-19.
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