NEW YORK _ NYC restaurants and bars could be closed over coronavirus for months and New Yorkers may soon be ordered to stay home, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday.
"This is going to be months, there's no question about it," the mayor said when asked about the restaurant and bar closures on CNN. "I'm very, very worried about...the impact on people's livelihoods."
De Blasio said the city is "absolutely considering" ordering residents to "shelter in place" like San Francisco.
"It could get to that for sure," he said, comparing the crisis to the Great Depression and the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Restaurants and bars were ordered to only take delivery and pickup orders starting Monday night to stem the spread of coronavirus, which has infected at least 183,000 people across the globe. New York City has 463 confirmed cases as of Monday and seven people have died.
Gyms, casinos, nightclubs, movie theaters, small theater houses, concert venues are also all closed.
De Blasio said that businesses could "absolutely" be shuttered "even longer" than even April and May � with his own health commissioner predicting the outbreak may last through September.
"We need to have in our minds that this could be a crisis of at minimum several months...it could take us well through the summer," de Blasio said on CNN.
De Blasio has also said that public schools � closed until at least April 20 � may be shut down for the rest of the school year.
The closures mean the federal government needs to provide "direct income replacement," de Blasio said on CNN.
"There's not even a recognition of the sheer human and economic dislocation that's happened already, let alone what we're going to see as we go in April, May, June," he said.
De Blasio didn't think a $1,000 check for every American adult, as proposed by Sen. Mitt Romney, isn't enough for a "three to six month crisis."
"People want to work, we're telling them that they can't...it's not safe to work," he said, acknowledging that people need to buy food, medicine and rent.
