Outbreaks are giving taste of living with the virus
New York City and, Washington, D.C., now see rise in cases
The U.S. is getting a first glimpse of what it's like to experience COVID-19 outbreaks during this new phase of living with the virus, and the roster of the newly infected is studded with stars.
Cabinet members, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Broadway actors and the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut have all tested positive. Outbreaks at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University are bringing back mask requirements to those campuses as officials seek out quarantine space.
The known infections likely reveal only the tip of the iceberg — with actors and politicians regularly tested at work. Official case figures are certain to be vast undercounts of how widely the virus is circulating because of home testing and mildly sick not bothering to test at all.
Across the nation, maskwearing is at its lowest level since April 2020, said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington. For every 100 infections, only seven are recorded in official tallies, according to his modeling group's latest estimate. That means a place like New York City that's averaging 1,600 cases a day has a dramatically higher true number of infections.
Immunity beneficial
Mokdad expects the high level of U.S. immunity built up from previous infections and vaccinations will protect the nation from a large surge.
“We're going to have some infections here and there, but it's not going to shut down the country,”
Mokdad said. “Life has to go on. We have to be vaccinated and boosted. We need to protect the vulnerable, but we have to get used to it.”
Some rising cases
While much of the United States has reported a plateau in coronavirus cases in recent weeks, New York City and Washington, D.C., have been battling a swift rise in cases in the last two weeks as the virus has again upended Broadway and the halls of the federal government.
Cases have doubled in Washington and have risen about 60% in New York City since the last week of March, according to New York Times databases.
Although caseloads have been relatively low in the weeks since the omicron surge receded, the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant is contributing to a new wave in some places, especially in the Northeast.
Across the United States, caseloads have stopped falling and have started to rise in states including Alaska, Vermont, Colorado, Rhode Island and New York. Experts have been warning that another surge was coming since the recent surge in Europe, where past virus waves have been a harbinger of what was to come in the United States.
On Broadway, several performances of the comedy “Plaza Suite” were canceled after Matthew Broderick tested positive, followed by his wife and co-star, Sarah Jessica Parker. Daniel Craig, too, has been sidelined from his revival of “Macbeth.”
Large indoor gatherings with masks optional have led to infections, with a high-profile party in Washington, D.C., now seen as a possible super-spreader event. Other infection clusters outside of groups that are regularly tested might go undetected, said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy with the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington.
“It's harder now than it was before to know what's happening. The future is a little fuzzier because we don't have as much information at our fingertips,” Michaud said.
The public health response will vary from community to community based on what's happening locally, Michaud said.
“We're fighting smaller fires instead of a raging blaze across the country and those smaller fires can be disruptive,” Michaud said.