Following his issuance of a Code Blue warning on Friday, and in an apparent effort to walk the walk, Mayor de Blasio took to the subway over the weekend and urged at least two homeless men to go to a shelter. "You deserve better than sleeping in a subway station," the Mayor told one of the men on the 2nd Avenue F platform on Sunday, who ultimately accepted the invitation from DHS personnel standing by.

One hundred and five homeless people were taken to shelters or hospitals on Saturday night according to the City, as wind chill dipped well below zero. Of that group, one was taken involuntarily. An additional 288 people walked into hospitals across the city to escape the cold.

For comparison, during the last Code Blue warning, 30 people were taken to shelters or hospitals, 2 involuntarily.

When a Code Blue is in effect—the order can be issued when temperatures dip below freezing—homeless New Yorkers can go to any shelter in the city, regardless of capacity, without having to go through the typical intake procedures. This weekend DHS also doubled its overnight patrol to 160 outreach workers between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.

This weekend's frigid temperatures came less than a week after the City's annual HOPE Count, when more than 3,000 volunteers take to the streets for one night in an effort to accurately count the city's street-homeless. The event has long drawn criticism from advocates for the homeless, some of whom argue that the count is inevitably inaccurate—taken on one of the coldest nights of the year, it tends to miss chronically street-homeless New Yorkers who have taken temporary shelter from the cold. ("They're just going to use the HOPE count to find out where we are, so they can send more cops to harass us," said Picture The Homeless member Ousmane Dramae last week.)

This year, one woman who accepted shelter during the HOPE Count didn't receive it, because volunteers were unable to summon a DHS van to pick her up.

In early January, Governor Cuomo issued an executive order calling for police to forcibly remove homeless people from the streets in below-freezing weather. The order was promptly picked apart by civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, who told the NY Times that it is technically illegal to forcibly remove a person from the street so long as he or she is not blocking pedestrian traffic or building entrances. Rather, under the New York State Mental Hygiene Law, a police officer is mandated to interview the individual and determine his or her mental capacity before intervening with force.

As of Sunday afternoon, there were no known casualties from the cold spike. However, the News reports that a 74-year-old man was found dead under a Bronx overpass around 4:00 p.m. yesterday, near the intersection of East 177th Street and Devoe Avenue. The man, who has yet to be identified but apparently was not homeless, had a visible head injury. The Medical Examiner will determine whether he slipped and fell, and then froze to death.