Medical workers were moved to tears as Mayor de Blasio and first responders clapped for them outside of Bellevue Hospital Friday evening.
“It definitely brings the morale up — for all of us,” said nurse Hilda Tucubal, 46, of Princeton, New Jersey.
“We bring that back home. We go to bed. We’re a little more uplifted. Sometimes it’s trying what we see there, and sometimes we see good things,” she added.
Firefighters honked the horns of their trucks and flashed their lights — and shouted chants of “Bellevue rocks!”
Neighbors hung out of their open apartment windows to clap and bang pots and pans.
“We don’t know what we’re going to see in there when we walk in the morning,” Tucubal told The Post.
“So being sent off at night with all the firefighters is definitely uplifting. You feel love from the city.”
“It’s warming, actually, to see their faces,” said NYPD Deputy Inspector Steven Hellman of the hero medical workers.
“How happy they were, the tears in their eyes — It was a great feeling.”
De Blasio, donning a blue bandana over his face, joined a long line of firefighters and cops to applaud their frontline fight against the coronavirus pandemic in the country’s outbreak epicenter.
The mayor, who did not deliver a speech, eventually wheeled a coffee cart into Bellevue for staff with first lady Chirlane McCray.
“We are the epicenter of this crisis. But we’re also watching our city become an epicenter of hope, of heroism and of love for those on the frontlines,” de Blasio tweeted. “[McCray] and I felt it during shift change at Bellevue tonight.”
City Hospitals have been badly overwhelmed by the rapid spread of the coronavirus, with some having medical staff work without proper safety gear to treat a surging number of patients.
More than 40 percent of the United States’ coronavirus deaths have taken place in New York state, where more than 170,500 people have been infected and another 7,800 have died due to the virus.