Goodnight New York

Emera began working in Manhattan for his family’s business at the age of 13, fully immersing him in the hustle of the city lifestyle. While commuting back-and-forth after the COVID-19 executive orders were set forth by Governor Cuomo, Emera captured New York City’s iconic places without the usual noise exclusively on his iPhone.

“Goodnight New York” is a fusion of his love of black and white photography and editorial design.

The following is a collection that were published during the month of March from The New York Times, Politico, AM New York Metro, and News Day publications.

Omar Emera owns all rights to the photographs taken.

For the city that never sleeps,

this was not an easy command.

On March 1st, 2020, New York City has had its first person test positive for the novel coronavirus, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot confirmed Sunday evening. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson has confirmed that the positive test came from a woman in Manhattan. Governor Andrew Cuomo said earlier in the evening that the state had reported its first positive test for the coronavirus. Cuomo said the person who tested positive is a woman in her late 30s who contracted the virus while traveling abroad in Iran. The one woman has respiratory symptoms but is not in serious condition and is currently isolated in her home, according to Cuomo. The test was confirmed in Wadsworth Lab in Albany, according to Cuomo. “There is no cause for surprise - this was expected,” Cuomo said in a statement. “As I said from the beginning, it was a matter of when, not if, there would be a positive case of novel coronavirus in New York.”

More than 100 test positive in two neighborhoods, all at two urgent care centers crammed with worried families. Health officials expressed growing alarm on Wednesday that the coronavirus is spreading quickly in tightly knit Hasidic Jewish communities in Brooklyn, saying that they are investigating a spike in confirmed cases in recent days. More than 100 people have recently tested positive for the coronavirus in Borough Park and Williamsburg, two Brooklyn neighborhoods with sizable Hasidic Jewish populations — all of them tested at two urgent care centers that have been crowded with anxious patients, according to an urgent care center employee.

The tests were conducted at Asisa Urgent Care facilities in each neighborhood, and the results were all received by the end of the day on Tuesday. On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would begin to increase its testing capacity from the current level of several hundred tests a day. The increase would start on Thursday, with the expectation of reaching the goal of 5,000 tests a day after “several days,” he said. At a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. de Blasio said there were no known clusters of coronavirus in the city. A cluster is an interconnected group of cases that can be traced to the same source. Such a group emerged in New Rochelle this month.

THE OCULUS

New Yorkers should expect that half the city’s population will get coronavirus by the time the pandemic runs its course.

Mayor Bill de Blasio

Eighty percent of those infected are expected to have relatively mild cases, while roughly 20 percent are likely to be hospitalized. The city is adding new morgue facilities in tents and trailers to hold the corpses, as existing morgues near their capacity. A large tent and refrigerated trucks have been set up near Bellevue hospital on Manhattan’s East Side. “I know the morgues push a really strong emotional button, obviously. We’re all humans. It’s a very troubling thing to see, and it makes it very immediate, very visceral,” de Blasio said. “It’s going to be very, very painful.” The majority of those infected so far — 56 percent, according to Health Department data — are under the age of 50.

But more than 75 percent of those hospitalized and all but five people who have died are over 45. The number of infections has continued to grow despite a statewide shutdown of non-essential businesses and ban on gatherings.

WESTSI HWY The city is only set to receive about $1.3 billion, out of $150 billion offered to states and localities. “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 that didn’t happen,” he said, blaming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the omission.He said he plans to call President Donald Trump directly to ask for more. “Everyone in the country knows New York City is the epicenter of this crisis,” de Blasio said. “We are one third of cases in the country right now. Someone do the math down there in Washington.”

IDE

PARK AVE Public Advocate Jumaane Williams called for a “full lockdown,” which would prohibit New Yorkers from leaving their immediate neighborhoods except for essential work, close parks and shut down construction. He said the city should also consider assigning people specific times during which they’re allowed to leave the house to get groceries. De Blasio said he is not considering closing parks, but may shut playgrounds on Saturday if families aren’t following rules to stay six feet away from other people. The city is also removing 80 basketball hoops at courts where illicit games continued. As he grapples with managing the epicenter of the crisis in the U.S., the mayor bashed a massive federal stimulus bill for offering little direct aid to New York City, echoing criticism from Gov. Andrew Cuomo earlier in the day.

HELL’S KITCHEN

FIDI Bill de Blasio said his administration has thoroughly studied the behavior of the coronavirus and says the real threat is not from world travelers, but rather community spread. A more nuanced analysis of COVID-19 has found that it does not live long on surfaces and is not airborne, but if someone sneezes in your mouth, nose or eyes, there may be a problem. De Blasio echoed Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Sunday morning message, warning New Yorkers to avoid congested spaces such as trains or buses.

We need a mandated lockdown, and we needed it yesterday.

Jumaane Williams, NYC Public Advocate

New York City is now largely considered the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., with 12,339 cases and at least 99 deaths. The city conducted 13,000 inspections of nonessential businesses including bars, restaurants and gyms in New York City over the weekend. Eleven violations were issued.

“That’s how seriously New Yorkers are taking this,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted on Sunday. There are a total of 20,875 cases and 157 deaths in New York state. Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted this weekend that the state is considering turning the Javits Center, one of Manhattan’s largest conference centers, as well as Stony Brook University, SUNY Old Westbury, and the Westchester County Center into hospital sites. Cuomo said Monday that the state is now testing 16,000 people a day for the novel coronavirus.

Worldwide, there are now 367,457 cases of COVID-19 and at least 16,113 people have died. About 100,000 people have recovered.

WEST 4 SUBWAY The city’s coronavirus death toll continued climbing to alarming heights with 722 new COVID-19 fatalities over 24 hours, bringing the grim total to 12,199 by Friday afternoon. The previous two days saw an increase of under 600 new deaths in the same 24 hour periods, according to statistics published by the city’s Health Department. The death tally includes 7,890 people who tested positive for the virus before they passed away as well as 4,309 victims who never got a test but showed tell-tale symptoms of the disease. Confirmed coronavirus cases also jumped from 117,565 Thursday to 122,148 Friday. Queens has the most COVID-19 cases at 37,477 followed by Brooklyn at 32,499, The Bronx at 27,014, Manhattan at 15,952 and Staten Island at 9,166. Although cases and deaths continue to rise, other coronavirus metrics are headed in a more promising direction.

ICU admissions and hospitalizations for suspected COVID-19 are down, Mayor Bill de Blasio stated during his daily press briefing Friday.

Confirmed cases of the coronavirus toppled 10,000 in New York City Sunday night, with an additional 36 deaths reported since this morning — bringing the city’s fatality total to 99. As of 6 p.m., 10,764 cases were confirmed, City Hall said, with at least 1,800 hospitalizations. Of those individuals, at least 450 are in the ICU. Staten Island hospitals are working to meet the capacity potentially needed to treat those inflicted with the virus, the Advance/SiLive.com previously reported. There are 3,050 confirmed cases in Queens, 2,324 in Manhattan, 3,154 in Brooklyn, 1,564 in the Bronx and 666 in Staten Island, according to City Hall. The number of confirmed cases, officials have repeatedly said, is due to an increase in testing and does not fully reflect the actual extent of the virus. Vice President Mike Pence said the country will be “caught up” on a backlog of tests by the middle of next week, but said the Trump administration is “directing commercial labs to prioritize people who are in the hospital for coronavirus tests” in an effort “to get the results of that as quickly as possible for every American.”

We’re fighting the same war, and this is a war, and we’re in the same trench, and I have your back and you have my back, and we’re going to do everything we can for the people of the State of New York.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo

Businesses in the state will be placed under a “density reduction” mandate, Cuomo said, requiring them to operate with no more than 50% of their employees to allow for social distancing and prevent the COVID-19 virus’ spread. Cuomo said there is an exception from the mandate for “essential services” — including grocery stores, food production, warehousing, pharmacies, health care providers, utilities, the media, banks and other financial institutions, and “other industries critical to the supply chain.” He said he understood the burden on businesses and the negative impact on the economy. “But in truth, we’re past that point as a nation,” he said. “There is going to be an effect on the economy, not only here in New York but all across the country. We’re going to have to deal with that crisis. But let’s deal with one crisis at a time. And let’s deal with the crisis at hand, and the crisis at hand is a public health crisis.” He aims to relax the rules as soon as possible. “Past data, China and South Korea shows,” Cuomo added, “that if you take more dramatic actions sooner, you actually reduce the spread and you recover faster.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo arrived to his daily coronavirus briefing in Albany, N.Y., on Saturday with cautionary good news: The state has continued to make progress in its battle with a virus that has killed more than 13,000 residents, enough people to populate an upstate small city. “If you look at the past three days, you could argue we are past the plateau and starting to descend,” Mr. Cuomo said. “So, we’re not at the plateau anymore, but we’re still not in a good position.” Mr. Cuomo announced the state’s daily death toll from the virus had fallen to 540, down from 630 a day earlier. It was the lowest daily number in more than two weeks. Still, he warned that the health crisis was far from over. On Friday alone, about 2,000 people were admitted to city hospitals with Covid-19 symptoms, a number similar to what hospitals were seeing as the pandemic began to peak in late March.

“If it wasn’t for the relative context we’ve been in, this would be devastating news,” Mr. Cuomo said. The number of people needing ventilators to breathe also decreased, “which is very good news,” the governor said.

Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face

them, and it doesn’t matter what the crisis is.

Jack Nicklaus