De Blasio vows help for struggling NYC tenants and grieving families waiting for death certificates during coronavirus pandemic

Mayor de Blasio pledged new support for New York City tenants struggling to make rent and grieving families waiting weeks for death certificates during the coronavirus pandemic on Friday.

Hizzoner and city public health officials also cautioned New Yorkers that injecting themselves with disinfectant may fatally poison them after President Trump suggested that doing so might deter the virus.

The city will spend millions more on a campaign to inform New Yorkers about coronavirus and how best to protect and care for themselves and their families, including robocalls, snail mail, advertisements and tele-town halls, de Blasio announced Friday.

Tenants can now call 311 to reach a new hotline to get help if they face eviction or other issues as part of a five-point plan to help renters.

The city provides free legal assistance to anyone who may be kicked out of their apartments.

“We need to make sure that every New Yorker can stay in their home during this crisis,” de Blasio said.

On top of the hotline, de Blasio reiterated his call to freeze rent for millions of New Yorkers and for the state to implement other measures to protect tenants.

De Blasio said the Rent Guidelines Board should halt rent increases for the city’s two million rent-stabilized tenants during an annual process used to determine hikes. He said the state should let tenants use security deposits to pay rent, allow those who miss bills to repay them over 12 months and extend the current moratorium on evictions for 60 days after the coronavirus crisis ends.

“The challenges landlords face right now are real…but they pale in comparison to the challenges that tenants are facing,” he said. “We need a rent freeze.”

City officials said they’ve also been working to fix and streamline the issuance of death certificates after some grieving New Yorkers have waited weeks for them.

“It’s very painful for a family that’s already gone through so much, that’s lost a loved one, to then be fighting for a death certificate, it’s just unacceptable,” de Blasio said.

Death certificates were backlogged partially because of the chaos caused by the pandemic. The city was also waiting for the feds to issue guidelines for when funeral homes and hospitals should consider a death caused by COVID-19, according to Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot.

The city also suspended in-person ordering of death certificates because of crowding restrictions due to coronavirus. Ensuring those can be registered electronically took “longer then we would have wanted” because funeral homes needed the capacity to do so, Barbot said.

“We’ve put more staff to ensure that we process death certificates in a more opt way,” she said. “It’s unacceptable that we have a family who’s waited that long to get a death certificate.”

The turnaround time depends on funeral homes, but families should get death certificates within a day or two, Barbot said.

Health officials also stressed that more people could die if they try to use disinfectants to treat coronavirus or protect themselves against the disease, as Trump suggested on Thursday.

“They need to hear the truth from a doctor, not from someone who doesn’t seem to really care about science at all,” de Blasio said of the president’s comment.

Barbot said, “introducing one of these products in any way, shape or form, be it by injection, ingestion or application on the skin is harming the body.”

Doing so will poison yourself and could cause you to die, added Dr. Jay Varma, a senior advisor for the city’s COVID-19 response.

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