Just a couple of weeks ago, New York City looked like a relatively bright spot in America’s fight over the coronavirus. It is now a hot spot facing a surge in cases, a struggle for evidence, a dilemma over a major event, and a grueling sense of already seen.
A wave of cases driven by the Omicron variant spreads through the most populous city in the country, which was the epicenter of the pandemic in its early days. Although health officials emphasize that the current situation is not the one experienced during the spring of 2020, in New York City it is seen how some Broadway shows have been canceled due to outbreaks, the mandate of the use of indoor masks returned and the makes testing more difficult.
“It is disappointing that we have not developed a better system for this and that we are not better prepared for there not to be another wave,” Jordan Thomas said Monday as he waited for a test at a city-run health clinic near downtown Brooklyn. .
With temperatures near freezing, Nina Clark joined the queue for the third time since her symptoms began Thursday. Once again, he decided to leave.
“I stood there in the cold and said, ‘I can’t do this,'” he said. “Wherever you go, there is a line.”
As health officials and experts urged people to get tested and booster doses, at every private pharmacy in Lower Manhattan
As health officials and experts urged people to get tested and booster doses, every private pharmacy in Lower Manhattan would line up for an hour.
“I’m just trying to stay optimistic,” Inga Chen said as she waited for the booster shot.
After closing some test centers last month due to lack of demand and in favor of emerging test trucks, the city is racing to expand capacity again. The 130,000 daily tests at city-sponsored sites are already double what they were just three weeks ago, and Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday that the city would add 20 fixed locations and three vans this week. It also plans to distribute 500,000 home test kits.
Dr. Mitchell Katz, who runs the city’s public hospital system, said officials did not anticipate “as much news about Omicron” or that supplies of home test kits are running low. Meanwhile, the smaller test sites had staffing problems this weekend as the workers themselves contracted the virus, he said.
Katz said the city would now make sure it had people ready to fill out and take other steps to ease the testing crisis.
The United States is grappling with the Omicron surge and a months-long surge driven by the delta variant. Additionally, many other parts of the country have had considerably higher infection rates than New York City in the past week.
“Um, we’ve never seen this before on #NYC,” the mayor’s public health adviser Dr. Jay Varma tweeted on Thursday, referring to the rising rate of positive tests in the previous days.
Nearly 42,600 people across the city tested positive Wednesday through Saturday, compared with fewer than 35,800 for the entire month of November. More than 15,000 additional positive tests returned Sunday.
The city has never had so many people test positive in such a short time since testing became widely available. There is no clear picture of how many people contracted the virus during New York City’s first surge in spring 2020.
As recently as Dec. 1, the number of new cases per person in New York City was more than half the state average, according to state figures. Now, the city is above the state average.
Hospitalizations have also been increasing, although more slowly. New admissions citywide averaged 110 per day as of the middle of last week, about double the number from the previous month. But the average at this time last year was around 230, and it topped 1,600 in early April 2020.
The average number of deaths per day approached 800 then and 100 at the end of January this year. It’s pretty stable, around a dozen, as of the middle of last week.
Hospitalizations and deaths tend to make cases go up and down. But officials note that in South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, an increase in cases has not been followed by a commensurate increase in hospitalizations and deaths.
New York hospitals say they have seen modest but manageable increases.
Still, hospitals are bracing for staff crunches, as infections or exposures force staff to stay home. Katz said that public system clinics are switching to almost all virtual visits so that some nurses and assistants can be transferred to hospitals and testing sites.
“We know how to do this. We are prepared, “he said in a virtual press conference with the Democratic mayor.
Somehow there is no comparison to the terrifying first attack of the virus, when no one was vaccinated, the use of masks was almost unheard of in New York and doctors were just beginning to learn how to treat COVID-19.
Still, some public health experts say officials here and elsewhere have yet to learn from the experience.
“We’re seeing insufficient reaction, continually,” said Dr. Stanley Weiss, a professor of epidemiology at Rutgers University. He believes officials should immediately redefine “fully vaccinated” to include boosters, limit indoor public spaces to those constantly vaccinated, boosted, and masked; and improve interior ventilation, among other steps.
Whatever the differences, there are still some echoes of 2020.
The city is weighing whether it can move forward with a beloved tradition – this time, the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, rather than the 2020 St. Patrick’s Day Parade. And residents are once again wrestling with decisions. about everyday activities that suddenly seem risky.
Sheldon Rogers went to his office Christmas party earlier this month, thinking it finally seemed safe to celebrate with colleagues at the tech company where he works in customer service. After a post-party outbreak, he spent nearly three hours waiting for a test, which came back negative, Wednesday at a privately run urgent care center in Brooklyn.
Miriam Van Harn waited in a 200-person test line in Times Square Monday, trying to find out if she could see her family at Christmas. He had spent a week hiding in his own apartment and isolating himself from a roommate who had tested positive.
“It definitely feels like the first wave of the pandemic, with that anxiety,” said Van Harn, a graduate student, recalling how “we didn’t know what was going on.”
“But we know what is happening now,” he added. “We have vaccines. We have masks. We know how to stay safe. ” Following the clemency, New York City is rocked by an impressive COVID-19 spike.
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