CNN’s Jake Tapper slammed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s idea for a ticker-tape parade for coronavirus health care workers “one of the stupidest ideas” he’s ever heard.
FOLLOW TODD STARNES ON TWITTER
De Blasio, who famously boycotted the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, announced Tuesday that the city will throw the “biggest, best” ticker-tape parade for all the first responders and health care workers who worked valiantly to save New Yorkers amid the crisis. (It will be interesting to see if Samaritans Purse workers get an invite.)
GET THE LATEST ON THE CORONAVIRUS FROM TODDSTARNES.COM
“We will honor those who saved us,” de Blasio said, according to CBS New York. “The first thing we will do, before we think about anything else, is we will take a time, as only New York City can do, to throw the biggest, best parade to honor these heroes.”
He said the parade will “mark the beginning of our renaissance.”
Tapper, who recently lashed out at rollerbladers in San Francisco, disapproved of de Blasio’s parade promise and said it was possibly the “stupidest thing” he’s ever heard.
Tapper was presumably concerned about possible future complacency after the virus and not the worthiness of health care workers to be honored.
Any kind of return to “business as usual” in the country will be determined by a myriad of factors. Assuming that there is no cure and no vaccine, the country will have to employ widespread testing, continue to practice social distancing and improve the practice of contact-tracing, which essentially keeps tabs on who is sick and who may have been exposed to the virus.
New York City has seen a painful amount of infections and deaths from the virus. As of Tuesday, 14,427 New Yorkers died from the disease, including 744 between Monday and Tuesday, according to the New York Post.
De Blasio said at the Tuesday press conference that the pandemic is continuing to rage across the city.
“We know we’re not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. We’ve got a lot more to do. And we also know that the impact of this disease is being felt right now,” he said, according to the New York Post.
De Blaiso did not estimate when the parade could take place.
Tapper, for his part, made headlines last month when he slammed Rollerbladers for disregarding shelter-in-place orders.
“Who the hell are you?” Tapper said, after pointing out how inconsiderate the Rollerbladers were.
“I get that people don’t understand it, but what bothers me is people who think, ‘I’m young, I’m not going to die from it.’ First of all, not necessarily true. Second of all, you could get really, really sick and you could be injured for the rest of your life with scarred lungs, and third of all, who the hell are you to be walking around just giving this to old people and you just flippantly dismiss it?” Tapper told co-anchor Dana Bash.