Manhattan’s Liz Krueger says bars and gyms must close if the city is to avoid another catastrophic experience with COVID-19.

New York City must return to a near total lockdown to avoid a disastrous second wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths, the State Senate finance chair told the WBAI Max & Murphy Show on Wednesday.

“The second round is here and it is foolish of us to think otherwise as our numbers go up,” Sen. Liz Krueger, a democrat representing Manhattan’s East Side, said. “We are heading towards a 3 percent weekly hit on the number of people testing positive in the city of New York. To me, that is a clear number that says ‘you need to stop.’ Meaning, you just need to push people to stop having public access to each other, they are causing a growth in this disease.”

Krueger spoke at the end of a dramatic day of gubernatorial shouting, behind-the-scenes scrambling and a mayoral decision to temporarily suspend in-person learning at all New York City schools. Both Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio indicated that measures affecting other spheres of life could be coming very soon.

“Nobody likes to hear that. Nobody wants to do this. I don’t want us to do this. I need us to do this,” Krueger said. “We need to stop sitting at restaurants together—both indoor restaurants and those outdoor restaurants that are being built into indoor rest with no standards or rules applied to them. … We have to stop having access to bars. We have to stop—I’m sorry—going to gyms.”

“We have to not go to our offices if they’re not essential-worker-type jobs,” she continued. “We basically have to lock ourselves down. People hate that term, but we do, in order to protect each other from continuing to grow the rates of this disease.”

Hear our conversation with Krueger below or listen to the full show, which included a chat with Councilmember Mark Treyger about the school shutdown.

Sen. Liz Krueger on the Second COVID-19 Wave

Max & Murphy Full Show of November 18, 2020

With reporting by Inès Yildiz