NYC once again center of pandemic
Highly contagious omicron spreading quickly, with highest new cases in country
When Kass Wu moved to New York City to attend university in the summer of 2020, it seemed that the worst of the pandemic was over. After a spring in which hundreds of people died of the coronavirus each day, the city was slowly beginning to reopen and life returning to normal. Wu, 31, was excited to explore her new home and meet people.
It wasn’t until this summer, a year after Wu arrived, that the city finally felt somewhat normal — an impression that proved fleeting, as New York yet again finds itself at the center of the pandemic. In recent weeks, the highly contagious omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has quickly spread through the city, which now has one of the highest rates of new cases in the country despite taking more precautions than many communities and having a vaccination rate higher than the national average. So far, hospitalizations have remained comparatively low, given the high number of infections, although the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 has increased dramatically this month.
“This summer, I got a little taste of New York, and I was starting to really like it,” said Wu, a student at the State University of New York College of Optometry. “Just when I thought everything was getting better, it’s hitting us again.”
City officials, businesses and residents are trying to strike a delicate balance — preventing a full-blown public health crisis while trying to keep the city open and running. This month, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul instituted a statewide requirement that masks be worn in all indoor public places unless businesses or venues implement a vaccine requirement.
Outgoing New York Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio has flatly ruled out a lockdown as was imposed in the early days of the pandemic, and he announced this week that schools will reopen as planned on Monday. But parts of New York are shutting down fully or partially of their own will. As the city logged record-high numbers of infections this week, officials struggled to provide basic services to New York’s 8.8 million residents.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority started suspending subway service on Wednesday because there weren’t enough healthy transit workers to operate the system. As of Thursday night, service on three subway lines had been stopped.
The New York City Fire Department has pleaded with residents to call 911 only if they were experiencing a real emergency. With a third of the agency’s paramedics out sick, department officials said the system was being overwhelmed by calls from people with mild COVID-19 symptoms who wanted rides to hospitals to be tested for coronavirus infection. The New York Police Department canceled days off for any officer healthy enough to work through New Year’s.
The federal government has dispatched 60 Federal Emergency Management Agency medical workers and 30 auxiliary ambulances to New York, and has set up nine new testing sites, said Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. Three more testing sites are to open Sunday, he said.
“We’ve been working around-the-clock to surge reinforcements to communities as they battle omicron, helping to staff hospitals, administer monoclonal antibody treatments, transport patients, add testing capacity and get more PPE to where it is needed,” Zients said.
Many New York City businesses are struggling to stay open. According to a survey from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, 77 percent of small businesses have seen less business than they did last year. Almost 60 percent of businesses have experienced employees calling out sick, and 20 percent were forced to close altogether, according to the survey.