Brooklyn restaurants are closing one after another due to an outbreak of infections, the lines to get tested are getting longer: New York fears to relive the nightmare of 2020, when the city was the global epicenter of the epidemic of COVID-19.
On Saturday evening, New York State, the fourth most populous in the country with some 20 million inhabitants, announced for the second consecutive day a record number of positive cases in the coronaviruswith nearly 22,000 contaminations.
In Brooklyn, since the end of the week, in the fashionable neighborhood of Greenpoint, more than a dozen bars and restaurants have temporarily lowered the curtain after sudden cases among their employees or their customers.
Near McCarren Park, around 30 people line up in front of a parked medical van offering rapid tests.
“It looks a lot like March 2020,” breathes Spencer Reiter, 27, a neighborhood resident who works in finance and came to get tested with his friend Katie Connolly, a student, because their friends are positive for COVID-19.
” Really crazy ”
“Seeing these lines (…) is as if everything was starting over again”, he confided to AFPTV, his companion finding “it really crazy”.
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 film.
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.
” Back to square one ”
“We are in fact back to square one, perhaps even to much worse” than in March 2020, is alarmed Jolanta Czerlanis, a 54-year-old Polish woman, who came to be tested because she felt some symptoms.
“It’s very scary and it’s very worrying because we hoped it would get better,” said this catering employee.
And nervousness has won the United States in the face of the very rapid spread of the variant Omicron of Covid-19. President Joe Biden predicted a “winter of serious illness and death” for those who were not vaccinated on Thursday.
On December 1, the number of daily new cases nationwide averaged 86,000; on December 14, it was 117,000, an increase of about 35% 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.
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 said on CNN on Friday, a few days before his handover on January 1 with his elected successor, Eric Adams.
Mr. de Blasio 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. But there is nothing to say that Mr. Adams will enforce this decision.
Panic on Broadway
Just before Christmas, while New York was waiting for the return of its tourists, there is panic in the famous Broadway theater and musical district where the cancellations of performances are increasing, because of positive cases within the troops.
The latest casualty Friday night, the next four “Rockettes” shows at Radio City Music Hall have been canceled due to “increasing pandemic hardship,” according to the production.
As for the musical “Hamilton”, it was canceled without warning Thursday evening: “We really came by plane for a day only to see + Hamilton”, protested annoyed in front of AFPTV Dara and Myron Abston, a couple from Michigan.
And on Saturday night, at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, the famous entertainment show Saturday Night Live announced that it would be shot without an audience and with a reduced crew.
Edouard Massih, who runs a Lebanese grocery store in Brooklyn, remains open for the moment, but he fears that this wave of COVID-19 will cause a new exodus of inhabitants towards the north of New York, in green and upscale suburbs, as was the case in 2020 when the island of Manhattan was emptied.
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