But health experts don’t expect the recent surge to reach the levels seen in New York’s first and second waves.
Fueled by the Delta variant, the daily number of coronavirus cases in New York has started to climb in recent days, even as the city appears determined to turn the page on the pandemic.
Just a few weeks ago, there were only 200 new cases per day on average in the city, the lowest level since the early days of the pandemic. But the city has now seen a streak of days with 400 or more cases. And the test positivity rate has doubled: from less than 0.6% on average to about 1.3%.
Those numbers are still low, but the increase has been rapid, surprising some epidemiologists and public health officials who did not expect cases to increase so quickly after remaining at the same level throughout June.
Still, with around 64% of adults in the city fully vaccinated, epidemiologists said the Delta variant was unlikely to create conditions as devastating as the last two waves of Covid-19.
Civil servants and experts are concerned
“Alarming is not the right word” to describe the recent increase in cases, said Denis Nash, epidemiologist at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. “I would say concerning.”
The Delta variant is much more contagious than the original form of the virus that swept through the city in March 2020. It is also more contagious than even the highly transmissible B.1.1.7 variant (which was first detected in Great Britain). Brittany and has since been renamed Alpha) which outperformed the other variants during the city’s long second wave.
The Delta variant was detected in a few cases in New York in February during the second wave, but has really made inroads in the past two months, when there was relatively little virus circulating in the city. At the end of May, it represented about 8% of the cases sequenced by the city, and in mid-June, more than 40%. Yet throughout June, the number of infections remained low, at around 200 cases per day.
Given the contagiousness of the Delta variant, experts are not surprised that the number of cases has finally started to climb. Countries around the world are experiencing a surge as a result of Delta. In the UK, with a vaccination rate exceeding that of the US, cases have skyrocketed, but hospitalizations have increased more slowly.
“The parameters to watch closely are hospitalizations and deaths,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University.
So far, these metrics have remained stable in New York City. The average number of daily seven-day hospitalizations this week remained below 20. The city recently recorded an average of four or five Covid-related deaths per day.
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The hope, if not the expectation, was that the summer would be a time of few cases. The number of cases remained low in New York City last summer as the city emerged from a devastating first wave. That only changed in September uh, when the increase in transmission in a few places in Brooklyn and Queens preceded a citywide spike in cases that eventually became a second wave that lasted until ‘in spring.
In interviews in recent weeks, some epidemiologists have said they expected a calm summer followed by a slight increase in cases as students return to school and Manhattan office workers migrated back to the office.
But in the last week of June, the number of people testing positive suddenly increased to 300 on June 30. A four-day streak of more than 400 cases followed last week.
The coronavirus epidemic ›
“We have seen an increase in cases and positivity, but we have also seen hospitalization rates continue to drop,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said this week.
The city focused on Staten Island
In press conferences, health officials have tended to focus on a borough where vaccination rates are lower than the city on average, wearing masks is unpopular, and positivity rates tend to be above average. out of town, as they have been doing for much of the past year.
“In Staten Island, the percentage of positivity and the number of cases have increased in the last few days and weeks”, the health of the city “And that’s because we have unvaccinated individuals, especially younger people, who remain unvaccinated. “
But the rise goes well beyond Staten Island. The number of cases has increased considerably in all the districts. In Brooklyn, the average number of daily cases has nearly doubled in recent weeks, from less than 60 to more than 100. On Tuesday, the ZI The P code, which had the highest average positive test rate in the city, at 4 , 89, was in Harlem.
The unvaccinated are the most vulnerable
Health officials said the vast majority of people who tested positive had not been fully vaccinated.
The health ministry has yet to release statistics on the number of new cases among those fully vaccinated. Data from other countries show that a full regimen of vaccines used in New York offers a high degree of protection against the Delta variant.
Revolutionary cases are nevertheless not difficult to find. Their stories are circulating on Twitter and in clinics and other testing sites.
Tony Smith, a 31-year-old Brooklyn resident who works for a social impact company, thought he was done with Covid this spring, when he received his two doses of Pfize r vaccine. He had already caught the virus during the first wave in New York, suffering from After his second shot of the vaccine, his heart rate dropped and he started to feel normal. Then on Sunday, he woke up slightly ill. The next day, his heart rate was higher. And he felt the same terrible sensation in his chest that he had when he first had Covid-19. “It’s like the rustle of aluminum foil in my chest,” Smith said. He tested positive for the virus again on Tuesday. So far, he said, his symptoms were much milder compared to his first infection. “I can tell you right away, it’s extremely heartwarming to have been vaccinated,” he said. So far, the Delta variant has not led the city to drastically change its public health guidelines or virus restrictions. It also hasn’t affected plans by many large companies to get workers back to their Manhattan offices, according to Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a leading trade association. “It would have been prudent for our elected officials to specify in advance if, when and under what circumstances they would back off certain elements of the opening,” said Professor Nash. For now, the city’s main strategy against Delta is to continue urging the unvaccinated to get vaccinated. But in recent months, the number of doses administered has dropped. While vaccination rates are high in the lower half of Manhattan, much of Queens, and parts of Brooklyn, they lag behind elsewhere, particularly in black Jewish and ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. There have already been stark racial disparities in infection rate and death rate during the first two waves of the pandemic, with the virus hitting Hispanic and black New Yorkers hardest. These disparities could become even more pronounced now with Delta, given the uneven vaccination rates. “With the Delta variant, we can expect to see epidemics in zip codes where Africans Americans live because of the low vaccination rate,” said Dr Kitaw Demissie, dean of the School of Public Health at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. In interviews, epidemiologists said that to anticipate what might happen next, it was helpful to remember the 2018-19 measles outbreak that was largely concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities from Williamsburg to Brooklyn. The city’s response has not been major closures, but enforcement of vaccination requirements. “We can have localized outbreaks – similar to the outbreaks we’ve seen with measles,” says Dr Demissie. He expected these outbreaks to largely follow areas with low vaccination rates. The city is scrambling to find a way to increase vaccination rates, offering home vaccinations and other incentives. But Mr de Blasio has shown little interest in forcing vaccinations or pressuring people through testing requirements or other inconveniences. It has non-mandatory vaccinations for 400,000 city government employees, as has San Francisco.Delta has not caused the city to consider restrictions
Measles offers a plan
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