Omicron’s New Year’s cocktail: Sorrow, fear, hope for 2022

PARIS — Sorrow for the dead and dying, fear of more infections to come and hopes for an end to the coronavirus pandemic were — again — the bittersweet cocktail with which the world said good riddance to 2021 and ushered in 2022.

New Year’s Eve, which used to be celebrated globally with a free-spirited wildness, felt instead like a case of déjà vu, with the fast-spreading omicron variant again filing hospitals.

At the La Timone hospital in the southern French city of Marseille, Dr. Fouad Bouzana could only sigh when asked what 2022 might bring.

“It’s starting to become exhausting,” he said, “because the waves come one after another.”

The mostly muted New Year’s Eve celebrations around the world ushered in the fourth calendar year framed by the global pandemic. More than 285 million people have been infected by the coronavirus worldwide since late 2019 and more than 5 million have died.

In Paris, officials canceled the fireworks amid surging infections and reintroduced mandatory mask-wearing outdoors, an obligation followed by the majority of people who milled about on the Champs-Élysées as the final hours of 2021 ticked away.

In Berlin, police urged people not to gather near the Brandenburg Gate, where a concert was staged without a live audience. In Madrid, authorities allowed only 7,000 people into the city’s Puerta del Sol downtown square, a venue traditionally hosting some 20,000 revelers.

In the United States, officials took a mixed approach to the year-end revelry: nixing the audience at a countdown concert in Los Angeles, scaling it back in New York yet going full speed ahead in Las Vegas, where 300,000 people were expected for a fireworks show.

President Joe Biden noted the losses and uncertainty caused by the pandemic but said: “We’re persevering. We’re recovering.”

“Back to work. Back to school. Back to joy,” Biden said in a video posted on Twitter. “That’s how we made it through this year. And how we’ll embrace the next. Together.”

In New York, officials planned to allow just 15,000 people — vaccinated and masked — inside the perimeter around Times Square, a fraction of the 1 million that typically squeeze in to watch the famed ball drop.

Elsewhere, the venue many chose for New Year’s celebrations was the same place they became overly familiarly with during lockdowns: their homes.

Pope Francis also canceled his New Year’s Eve tradition of visiting the life-sized manger set up in St. Peter’s Square, again to avoid a crowd. In an unusual move for Francis, the 85-yearold pontiff donned a surgical mask for a Vespers service of prayers and hymns Friday evening as he sat in an armchair. But he also delivered a homily standing and unmasked.

Yet boisterous New Year’s Eve celebrations kicked off in the Serbian capital of Belgrade where, unlike elsewhere in Europe, mass gatherings were allowed despite fears of the omicron variant. One medical expert predicted Serbia will see thousands of new COVID-19 infections after the holidays.