New York City appears to be no match for the convergence of the delta and omicron variants, despite some of the toughest Covid-19 restrictions and highest vaccination rates in the U.S.
Just as the city was getting more crowded and office vacancies were starting to shrink, an about-face has people again on edge. New cases of the virus are at the highest since January. Businesses are asking workers to stay home, schoolrooms are shutting and testing sites have long lines snaking around city blocks. And Broadway shows and restaurants are closing down as staff shortages and pockets of Covid outbreaks sprout up around the city at the busiest time of the year for tourism.
“We’ve never seen this before in NYC,” Jay Varma, public health adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio, said Thursday on Twitter. “Test positivity doubling in three days.”
Indeed, 7.8% of the city’s cases were positive on Dec. 12, up from 3.9% on Dec. 9, according to city data. Many of those cases are mild and hospitalizations and deaths are nowhere near the level seen in the early days of the pandemic. But city data show hospitalizations are also rising at a fast clip and have more than doubled since the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.
Just weeks ago, delta made up nearly all of the sequenced cases in the New York area. But omicron, which appears to be far more transmissible than earlier variants, has quickly grown to make up 13% of the region’s cases, according to modeling from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state and city don’t appear to sequence enough cases to be able to immediately confirm the variant’s spread.
De Blasio, who already required vaccinations for entry to restaurants and tourist attractions and mandated them for city workers, now is expanding the order to private companies as of Dec. 27. Governor Kathy Hochul this week began requiring masks in all indoor public places that don’t require proof of Covid-19 inoculations and ordered another million tests to send to communities in need.
New York state reported 18,276 new Covid cases on Dec. 15—its third-highest tally ever—including 8,318 in New York City.
“This is a health care crisis and people are going to die,” Hochul said Thursday when asked about resistance to her mandate. “That is not hyperbole, these are the facts right now.”
School Closures
The impact has already hit the city’s public schools, the largest U.S. system with roughly a million students.
Between the start of school and the end of November, there were three full school shutdowns and roughly 2,500 classroom closings, according to city Department of Education data. The city has now closed six entire schools and 4,200 classrooms.
“Thinking we were all out of this delta variant, and then having this new variant coming is all very scary,” said Amy Tsai, a parent of five in the Bronx.