EXCERPT:
DE BLASIO: "Mika, I think it's so important for people to hear the truth. You have doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers, EMTs, paramedics, all doing their job in a heroic fashion. They are fighting to save every life. I have absolute faith in them. What I don’t have faith in is that they will have the equipment they need, certainly, especially those ventilators, and they’ll have the reinforcements they need. Because here’s the problem. So many of our health care workers and first responders, they’ve gotten sick themselves. Most of them come back after seven days, ten days. But we’ve got to recognize, we’re not even — we don’t have our full complement we would normally have of these crucial, crucial, these life-saving folks, because a lot of them got sick themselves. On top of that, the demand keeps surging. That’s why we need those reinforcements. Now, Mika, again, I say to the president of the United States, I said to the Pentagon over a week ago, 1,000 nurses, 150 doctors, 300 respiratory therapists, for the nation’s largest city, 8.6 million people. You’d think in a country this big, this strong, that would be an easy request to fill. I’m still waiting. So those reinforcements have to come or our health care professionals will just be swamped. 1,500 deaths already, and we have not even gotten to the hard part of this."