Staff at New York City’s two federal jails, defense attorneys and inmates interviewed by the Daily News say the official numbers of COVID-19 cases obscure the magnitude of the crisis behind bars.

While the COVID-19 pandemic keeps New Yorkers separated by face masks and social distancing and self-quarantine, a growing number of city residents are connecting through local mutual aid groups now sprouting across the shuttered boroughs.

“I’m still going through the motions. The wounds are still really fresh,” said Johana Rocio Mendoza Chancay. “But I’m extremely grateful that my baby and I are alive,” she said, breaking down in tears.

An 83-year-old man was punched and had a gun put to his head by two masked men in Brooklyn, according to video released by police.

Roberto Correa, born and raised in Brooklyn, looms in his Sunset Park neighborhood as a prominent and popular figure: He owns The Booth NYC, a local clothing store/recording studio, and is a well-known local activist.

The heartless bandits with hidden faces are wanted for a violent robbery spree across Brooklyn and the Bronx over the past five weeks that includes beating an 83-year-old man, pistol-whipping a woman and shooting a bread deliveryman who survived a bullet to the pancreas.

When Deirdre Von Dornum and the others arrived at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal Bureau of Prisons staffer wearing no gloves or mask greeted them in the lobby, according to the email.

The fourth-year DA told the Daily News in an interview that his focus has shifted dramatically during the crisis, as trials and grand juries have been put on hold across the state.

New Yorkers leave messages of hope through the coronavirus pandemic.

Martin Greenfield Clothiers, creator of Joaquin Phoenix’s “Joker” suit and tailor to the well-dressed from President Obama to Mayor Bloomberg, is taking on coronavirus. The venerable custom suit maker teamed with its union workers to start producing protective face masks, with local community groups first on their list of beneficiaries.

The mayhem began when the assailant went berzerk inside an apartment building on Dorchester Road and East 21 St. in Flatbush about 10:50 p.m. Saturday, punching and kicking two men before stabbing one multiple times, police said.

NYC Mayor de Blasio denounced storing bodies in unrefrigerated and unmanned U-Haul trucks outside of Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home on Utica Ave. and Ave. M in Flatlands

The scene on 43rd St. between 13th Ave. and 14th Ave. unfolded at about 4 p.m. Thursday as mourners flouted social distancing norms to attend what was supposed to be a private funeral at the home of Rabbi Cheskel Wagshel, 95, said a family friend.

Antonio Rivera, accused of getting high in East New York amidst a group of people ignoring the city’s pandemic policies, was sent tumbling to the street when he came at one of the NYPD cops making arrests. The video shows police placing Rivera in handcuffs as he was lying on the ground behind their car.

Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged. Discuss

Frederick Scheinin, 29, of Sunnyside, Queens, allegedly chatted for months with a federal agent posing as a minor, and now faces charges in Manhattan federal court of attempting to entice a minor and attempting to produce child pornography.

The sophomore at H.E.R.O. High School in the Bronx, who dreams of being a pediatrician, spends her Saturdays learning from medical professionals and has been working closely with her school’s internships coordinator since the beginning of the school year to land a paid summer job working with kids.

Hall became a middle school science teacher in the Bronx in part so his students would never have that same experience. But for years, he was the only black male teacher on staff — which came with challenges of its own.

Two thousand workers from the Amalgamated Transit Union’s Local 1181 voted overwhelmingly to authorize the strike against their employer, which operates about 900 of the city’s more than 8,000 school bus routes.

For years, state officials have declined to fully fund the Foundation Aid Formula designed to dole out money to New York school districts based on need.

Critics have slammed the chancellor for making an early exit from a town hall in Bayside last week after two furious parents stood up mid-meeting to demand answers from the schools chief about alleged assaults their middle school children suffered at M.S. 158

The teen was shot three blocks from the high school in Queens Village at 2:45 Tuesday afternoon, just after school let out, cops said. The 911 caller described a group of students fighting before the shooting, according to police.

The “community schools” program, which infuses schools with mental health counselors, free vision and dental care, and classes for parents, boosted attendance and on-time graduation rates in participating schools from 2015-2018, according to the report from the research group RAND Corporation.

Advocates have long protested the lack of special education pre-K classes for 3- and 4-year-olds, which is federally mandated, even as the city invests millions in universal pre-K.

The hefty payout comes after the federal Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the city Education Department in 2016 for allowing a “pattern and practice of discrimination” to flourish at Pan American High School during the 2012-13 school year.

Carranza made an early exit from a community meeting in Bayside last week after two parents demanded answers about violent incidents at Marie Curie Middle School. “I in no way want to show disrespect to any parent that wants to be heard, and I apologize because as a parent myself, I can only imagine the pain parents are feeling when their children have been hurt,” he said.

Applied Behavior Analysis is administered frequently to 0-3-year-olds in the state’s Early Intervention system.

Wu, a former Vice President at George Mason University in Virginia, was voted in unanimously, 17-0, by the city university system’s Board of Trustees Monday night and will take office on July 1.

A fast-growing New York state program that funds math and science teacher salaries at private schools paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to some of the city’s priciest private schools that can charge over $50,000 a year for tuition, the Daily News has learned.

The special education courts are designed to protect the legal rights of those children, but the city’s system is so overburdened that vulnerable students wait months or years for help getting critical support, according to the legal complaint.

Two city Council member proposed universal summer camp.

The results from the city’s annual foster care census showed a precipitous decline from the 1990s, when there were 50,000 kids in foster care, and a continued improvement from 2010, when there were 17,000.

Lawrence Cuneo, an eighth-grade social studies teacher in the coastal town of Toms River, is under investigation by school officials.

The Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, which represents principals and assistant principals, won a 7.5% raise over four years, paid parental leave, and a commitment to hire more assistant principals, officials said Thursday.

The probe is part of a broader effort to monitor the influx of donations from other countries to American universities, which also includes investigations at Georgetown and Texas A&M. U.S. colleges are required under federal law to report foreign donations of $250,000 are more.

Shay Pilnik, the new president of the Yeshiva center and himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors, said the recent spate of anti-semitic attacks in New York shows the urgency of coordinated, deep study of the Holocaust.

New York City currently has fewer than 70 special education judges — called impartial hearing officers — to handle the thousands of complaints that special education students lodge every year against the city school system, resulting in more than 10,000 still-open cases.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, whose outspoken style and aggressive proposals on school diversity have made him a lightning rod in charged city schools debates, is traveling with two body guards after receiving menacing messages.

The teen and a pal stayed there for roughly 30 hours, most of which time they spent handcuffed to a bench in a Queens police precinct without food or water. “I still can’t sleep at home, because it’s always running through my mind,” 16-year-old Haily D’Souza told the Daily News.

The plaintiff, a former high school cheerleader identified only by the pseudonym “Mary Coe,” was in her first year at the school when defendant William Martire allegedly initially forced her to perform oral sex on him in the early 1980s, according to a horrifying 18-page Brooklyn Supreme Court filing.

Officials explained Wednesday that pushing the deadline from June to December for drafting a plan to diversify school enrollment in Queens’s District 28, which stretches from Forest Hills to Jamaica, would allow more people to give their input.

Flushing High School junior Arialis Guzman said she “just didn’t get treated right" while police held her and a friend for more than a day in the aftermath of an after school altercation. The teens spent the night of Wednesday, Feb. 12 and much of the next day, Feb. 13, handcuffed to a bench in a Queens police precinct.

Schools workers and their families will be eligible for the Employee Assistance Program, an initiative that helps city workers, at no cost, identify mental health issues, find counseling, and get specialized support for issues like addiction.

NYPD officers made fewer than 150 arrests in city schools between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2019 — about half the number of arrests cops made during the same months last year.

City middle and high school students streamed off buses and trains, buzzing with excitement for the afternoon’s entertainment. For some, it was the first chance to see a Broadway show.

City Council Member Debi Rose (D - Staten Island) said city students shouldn’t feel obligated to march with their schools or bands in the parade while event organizers refuse to let the Staten Island Pride Center march.

The New York Board of Regents said the move will allow the state to hire more judges and ease the growing backlog of cases.

A new state law allows teens to register as soon as they turn 16, and city officials are holding voter registration drives at city high schools and colleges this week to spread the word.

Under the policy, middle and high schools may consider attendance records when making admissions decisions — and fourth- and seventh-grade attendance records can be a factor in getting into the city’s most selective public schools.