NEW YORK – Mayor Bill de Blasio denied on Friday that the Big Apple has become a “ghost town,” as President Donald Trump said Thursday, and responded that the only ghost town “will be Mar-a-Lago when the President loses the election and retires “to that resort owned by the Trump Organization and his second home.
“If you go and look at what has happened in New York, it is a ghost town. Look what is happening. It is dying,” Trump exclaimed in the presidential debate held in Nashville (Tennessee), criticizing the policies of confinement due to the pandemic. of covid-19 imposed in cities like New York and defended by his rival, Democrat Joe Biden.
In an interview in the morning on MSNBC, De Blasio replied to Trump: “New Yorkers are proving that this city is going to resurface strongly and the only ghost town that is going to be, let me tell you, is going to be Mar- a-Lago after the election, when Donald Trump is forced to retire there. “
De Blasio, who boasts of his animosity towards Trump, said the only thing the president is trying to achieve with those statements is to divert attention from the mismanagement of the federal government since the arrival of the pandemic in the United States last spring and that it has stopped and more than 223,000 dead in the country, nearly 33,400 of them in New York state.
New York was the epicenter of the pandemic during the spring, but it has been progressively recovering after the measures of closures of shops, schools, restaurants and offices and the limitations on congregations of people.
However, these measures, combined with the strong impact of COVID-19, which led to hospital collapses, has made many families decide to leave the city temporarily or permanently and have bankrupted several thousand small businesses.
With the reopening of restaurants, shops and schools, the city has begun to regain normality, although it does not have the vitality of yesteryear, in part because it is not visited by the crowds of tourists and office workers that before the pandemic packed its streets.
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