In the United States, Covid-19 contaminations are exploding and so are cases of the Omicron variant, especially in New York. New York State is one of the 5 states with the most cases. In the city of 8.5 million people, residents are afraid of reliving the nightmare of 2020.
Saturday evening, the State of New York, the fourth most populous in the country with some 20 million inhabitants, announced for the second consecutive day a record of positive cases for the coronavirus, with nearly 22,000 contaminations.
In Brooklyn, since the end of the week, in the fashionable district of Greenpoint, more than a dozen bars and restaurants have temporarily lowered the curtain after sudden cases among their employees or their customers.
It must be said that New York was brought to its knees by the first wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The megalopolis of 8.5 million inhabitants, long nicknamed “the city that never sleeps”, had been completely deserted for weeks, like in a science fiction movie. The huge avenues of Manhattan were animated only by the anxiety-provoking sirens of the emergency services, with overwhelmed hospitals and morgues forced to store the bodies of victims in refrigerated trucks.
At least 34,000 New Yorkers have lost their lives since the spring of 2020 and the city, especially Manhattan, has never really regained its legendary effervescence before the health crisis.
A flashback
President Joe Biden on Thursday predicted a “winter of severe illness and death” for unvaccinated people. On Dec. 1, the number of new daily cases nationwide averaged 86,000 and on Dec. 14 it was 117,000, up about 35 percent in two weeks. And in the country officially the most bereaved in the world by this pandemic, the number of deaths from Covid-19 exceeded Tuesday 800,000 since 2020, according to the report of Johns Hopkins University.
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The variant “Omicron has arrived”, also notes the mayor of New York Bill de Blasio. “We have to admit it: it is moving very quickly and we have to be faster,” the Democratic city councilor told CNN on Friday, a few days before his handover on January 1 with his elected successor, Eric Adams.
The mayor of New York has imposed compulsory vaccination on municipal officials, as well as from December 27, in principle, on the entire private sector, i.e. 184,000 businesses and businesses.
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