Brooklyn halfway house reports four coronavirus cases in its tight quarters
Four inmates living at a Vinegar Hill halfway house have tested positive for COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, with one of them being removed from the facility by an ambulance last week.
The Brooklyn House Residential Reentry Center houses 160 federal inmates who sleep in bunk beds that often are no more than three feet apart from each other, in rooms that hold anywhere from four to 20 people.
Staff enter and exit and re-enter the center throughout the day and up until a few days ago when the house started to implement a mandatory quarantine, inmates were also allowed to come in and out.
Some have jobs — which they are no longer allowed to go to, even if they are considered essential workers — and others are able to go home to their families for visits. Now, they aren’t being allowed to go to those things, but they still exit the building to take out the trash and similar things.
With all of this coming and going, as well as with new inmates moving in from prison to transition into independent living again, the virus was brought in and easily spread among the residents.
“I would think that you’d probably be a little safer in prison because prison is a full lockdown, no one from the outside,” inmate Damian Campagna told The New York Daily News. “And obviously guys can’t go out when they’re in prison.”
Though four have been confirmed positive, it is likely that RCC Brooklyn has many more inmates with coronavirus, as some inmates were reported to be very sick and were sleeping with cold medicine bottles next to their beds.
The reason the number is so low? The center is refusing to test any more of its inmates, even the ones exhibiting symptoms.
“This is a life and death situation. People are playing Russian roulette with our lives,” another inmate told The Daily News in a phone interview. “I’m beyond freaked out because what they have is an alleged quarantine. How do you have a quarantine when staff are coming in and out coupled with the fact that inmates are coming in from prisons?”
Read more about this in this article: The New York Daily News
Brooklyn restaurant turns itself into a food bank for unemployed food service workers
A Prospect Heights restaurant made itself into a food bank to help provide meals for other food service workers who lost their jobs due to the coronavirus and now are food insecure.
The Olmsted restaurant cooks around 250 meals a day and its food bank is open between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. every day for restaurant workers or anyone else who could use a hot meal to come and pick up some homemade food.
The restaurant, which has around 60 staff members, was able to raise $75,000 on GoFundMe to be able to afford to do this, since they closed down once the state and city governments mandated that restaurants stop offering dine-in food services for social distancing efforts.
It also partnered with the Lee Project, which is a non-for-profit that helps workers in the foodservice industry if they become unemployed.
The food for the bank is donated by other nearby restaurants or made from Olmsted’s own garden. The food bank is also offering diapers and toiletries for free.
“Every restaurant they make what is called family meal,” Olmsted chef and owner Greg Braxtrom told New York 1. “And so you’re making simpler food, delicious comfort food for all of the employees. And we have 60 employees, so we were already doing that for 60 people. So it’s not that crazy for us to add another 150 to that.”
In addition to all this, Olmsted’s owners founded the New York Hospitality Coalition to provide information to service industry workers and owners quickly over Instagram.
“We wanna’ give as much resource to the community as possible,” Olmsted owner Max Katzenberg said.
Read more about this in this article: New York 1
NYC Health Dept. reports that Queens has one-third of all of the city’s COVID-19 cases
The New York City Health Department’s regular reports show that Queens is currently in the lead with the most coronavirus cases out of the five boroughs, actually totaling one-third of the entire city’s case amount.
As of 9:30 a.m. yesterday, New York City had 44,915 confirmed cases and 1,139 deaths from the virus. Out of those numbers, 14,966 cases and deaths came from Queens.
Brooklyn has the next most amount of coronavirus cases, with 12,076 cases and 264 fatalities. The Bronx has the third-highest case rate but actually the second-highest amount of deaths, with 8,398 and 289 respectively.
The remaining two states have significantly less cases. Manhattan has 6,960 cases and 132 deaths, and Staten Island has 2,480 cases and 67 deaths.
Additionally, the Health Department’s report explained that there have been 8,549 hospitalizations over coronavirus.
Read more about this in this article: Queens Courier
Queens Historical Society offers online historical workshops
Even though the coronavirus has forced every non-essential business or organization to close for social distancing and self-quarantining, the Queens Historical Society is still conducting online services.
The society is offering remote workshops for which it began selling tickets online on March 30. Tickets are $20 for an individual or $125 for groups of up to 50 people.
People who get tickets will be able to watch and participate in workshops conducted by QHS Education and Outreach Coordinator Jeran Halfpap.
Some of the workshops that the society is currently offering include “Census 2020: Backwards and Beyond” about how local demographics have been shown to change from census data, “Colonial Toys and Games” on how to use household items to do activities from the 1800’s.
There are also other workshops about the Underground Railroad and Ative American archeology.
Read more about this in this article: The Queens Daily Eagle
