Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday he wants to send the city’s COVID-19 hot-spot neighborhoods into lockdown again starting Wednesday — shutting down all of their non-essential businesses, public and private in-school learning and indoor and outdoor restaurant dining.
Kids in the nine neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens could still attend school for the next two days before going all remote Wednesday, de Blasio said — while houses of worship will remain open.
“We’re having an extraordinary problem — something we haven’t seen since spring,’’ de Blasio told reporters on a conference call, referring to the uptick in the coronavirus in those areas.
About a half-million people would be affected by the return to the kind of drastic shut-down that the city hasn’t seen since one was instituted in mid-March.
The move would shut down in-classroom learning for 100 public schools and another 200 private schools, the mayor said.
Restaurants would still be allowed to offer take-out and pick-up orders.
Meanwhile, another 11 neighborhoods in the city are on a “watch list’’ over their COVID-19 numbers — and would lose indoor dining and have their gyms and pools closed starting Wednesday morning under the city’s push.
The 11 zip codes could end up going into full lockdown, like the most worrisome nine zip codes, if their numbers don’t improve, the mayor warned.
He noted that such regional lockdowns “will require the support and approval of the state’’ and that city will be holding “intensive’’ talks with the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the next day over the issue.
“This can only happen with state approval,’’ the mayor said. “We’ll be working to get approval.”
A rep for Gov. Cuomo, asked by The Post for a response to de Blasio’s push, only repeated what the governor told reporters in his own conference call earlier in the day about cracking down on scofflaws in the hot zones.
“The state cannot take over effective enforcement for every jurisdiction, and if a local jurisdiction cannot or will not perform effective enforcement of violating entities, notify the state, and we will close all business activity in the hot spots where the local governments cannot do compliance,’’ Cuomo said in the e-mailed statement.
He said the state will be doing its own “aggressive enforcement” starting tomorrow.
Cuomo added that if “localities do not do testing immediately in the schools in those [COVID-troubled] areas, the state will close them immediately.’’
His office did not respond to questions about the extent of the testing the state is demanding, including who would have to undergo it and how often.
New York City currently mandates only random monthly testing of students, teachers and other building workers.
De Blasio said he hopes to keep the neighborhood lockdowns to a “brief duration … two to four weeks.’’
The move was prompted by the fact that the nine zip codes showed virus infection rates at 3 percent or above for at least seven consecutive days, the mayor said.
-Additional reporting by Bernadette Hogan