New York City Coronavirus Cases Reach ‘High’ Alert Level (Published 2022) (2024)

Virus cases in N.Y.C. reach the city’s ‘high’ alert level.

This latest wave of coronavirus cases — New York City’s fifth — began in mid-March and has taken less of a toll so far than when Omicron first swept through the city in December and January. In that initial Omicron wave, perhaps 30 percent of the city was infected, according to research by the C.D.C., and hospitals came under strain as sick patients packed emergency rooms.

The city’s color-coded alert system incorporates data on both case counts and hospitalizations. And it ties specific recommendations to each threshold. On Tuesday, the city entered the orange, or “high” risk level, which comes with the recommendation that city government requires face masks in all public indoor settings.

But Mr. Adams has shown little interest in requiring masks. At the “high” level, the mayor may consider reinstating a mask mandate, including in schools, but on Monday he said he was not planning to take that step yet.

On Tuesday, his health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, put out a statement urging that New Yorkers take their own precautions. But he made no mention of taking government action to impose mask mandates.

“New York City has transitioned to a high Covid alert level, meaning now is the time to double down on protecting ourselves and each other by making choices that can keep our friends, neighbors, relatives and co-workers from getting sick,” he said in a statement.

On Monday, Dr. Vasan issued an advisory recommending that people wear medical-grade masks in offices, grocery stores and other public indoor settings.

Still, some New Yorkers were struck by how long it has taken the city to raise the alert level to high, given that the virus has been circulating widely over the past two months, with test positivity rates in some neighborhoods well over 10 percent.

“The thresholds are meaningless,” said Professor Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy, in a phone interview Tuesday morning, as he recovered from Covid-19.

The F.D.A. authorizes Pfizer-BioNTech boosters for children ages 5 to 11.

Some experts have suggested that because children 5 to 11 received a much lower initial dose than older children or adults, they particularly need a booster. One study done by New York researchers found that for children 5 to 11, the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against infection fell to 12 percent from 68 percent by four to five weeks after the second dose.

Another C.D.C. study stated that two Pfizer doses reduced the risk of Omicron infection by 31 percent among those 5 to 11, compared with a 59 percent reduction in risk among those 12 to 15. Dr. Peter Marks, the F.D.A.’s top vaccine regulator, said that “emerging data suggest that vaccine effectiveness against Covid-19 wanes after the second dose of the vaccine” in all age groups.

The newly authorized booster dose is the same strength as the first two shots. In a news release on Tuesday, Pfizer said its clinical trial data showed that the additional shot produced a strong immune response in the age group, generating neutralizing antibodies against both the Omicron variant and original version of the virus.

The F.D.A. said the safety of the dose was assessed in about 400 children. The most commonly reported side effects were pain, redness and swelling at the injection site, as well as fatigue, headache, muscle or joint pain and chills and fever.

In a news release, Pfizer said the side effects were similar to those for the first two doses.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

The White House opens up another round of free, at-home virus tests to order through the Postal Service.

Rapid at-home tests, which typically deliver results within 15 minutes, have become more prevalent and accessible in pharmacies, making the total number of virus cases around the nation more difficult to track. People who test positive using at-home tests typically do not report the results to local health departments, so many new infections are going uncounted.

Still, with more transmissible forms of the virus spreading in recent months, the tests continue to be critical resources for many Americans, including those who can quickly diagnose an infection and receive antiviral treatments such as Paxlovid.

The number of courses of Paxlovid dispensed has increased more than 300 percent over the past month, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, said on Tuesday that the new round of at-home tests were an important resource to help people avoid spreading the virus.

“Going to a large gathering? Use rapid tests to not be the person who brings Covid to the party,” Dr. Jha wrote on Twitter. “Visiting a vulnerable relative? Use rapids tests to keep them safe.”

The White House has warned that without more funding from Congress, the administration may not be able to “sustain” domestic test manufacturing this year, potentially leading to companies winding down production and leaving the nation more blind to the virus if demand for the tests should surge and go unmet.

Manufacturers continue to be able to churn out the tests, according to Mara Aspinall, an expert in biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University who is on the board of directors of OraSure, which makes coronavirus tests. Manufacturers that have received federal authorization could make an estimated 422 million rapid at-home tests this month, and 402 million next month, down from a peak of 535 million in February, according to figures Ms. Aspinall collected.

The Bidens join mourners after the Buffalo shooting in an area that is a significant virus hot spot.

Kara Kane, a spokeswoman for the health department, said on Tuesday that the county’s new-case figures were slightly lower — about 5 percent — than they were the week before.

“Though it is too soon to tell if this marks the start of a longer downward trend, this was an encouraging data point,’’ Ms. Kane said.

County health officials and the C.D.C. are advising residents to follow safety measures, including wearing a well-fitted mask in public indoor settings, regardless of vaccination status. That guidance also applies to schools.

The county does not have a general mask mandate in force, except in certain settings determined by New York State. Even so, officials said that people who test positive, or have symptoms, or have been exposed to someone with Covid-19, should wear a mask in public.

The Bidens wore masks during their visit to Buffalo, though the president removed his mask for his speech about the 10 people who were killed on Saturday at a Tops supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of the city. As the president spoke, Dr. Biden stood next to him, wearing a mask.

After the speech, Mr. Biden put his mask back on, and then briefly shook a few hands in the crowd.

Concerns about the high level of coronavirus in the community could have an impact on plans for the funerals of the shooting victims, which may attract sizable crowds.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Apple delays and modifies its return to office plans in the Bay Area.

Shanghai says its Covid outbreak is under control, but many residents remain locked down.

But even as state media celebrated, some Shanghai residents pushed back, noting that they were still under strict lockdown measures. Under the Xinhua post on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, the most-liked comment was by a user who said they had just finished doing another mandatory coronavirus test and were still not allowed to leave their neighborhood. Others said they still could not receive deliveries and were running low on essentials.

Even in areas with looser restrictions, residents who were allowed to leave their neighborhoods had to first receive permission from neighborhood officials, and could only be out for a certain amount of time and in certain areas, state media acknowledged.

Schools remain closed, as do theaters, gyms and other cultural venues. The city would prioritize restarting work at industrial facilities, said Zong Ming, a deputy mayor.

In a widely shared article on WeChat, titled “Is ‘Shanghai’s cooking oil smell returning’ a lie?” a blogger there, Zhang Pei, wrote that many friends elsewhere had messaged her to congratulate her on the city reopening. But she did not know how to respond, as her complex remained sealed.

“We really feel like we are living in a parallel universe,” she wrote. “We don’t know who has gone to work, where has returned to business.”

In a jab at state news media’s tendency to dismiss any bad news as rumors or isolated incidents, she added: “When it’s good news, as long as it’s true in one place, that’s the same as it being true everywhere, and it’s not a rumor. When it’s bad news, as long as it’s not true everywhere, then that’s the same as it not existing.”

Joy Dong contributed research

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

North Korea’s Covid outbreak continues to spread.

North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, remained locked down on Monday under a “maximum emergency epidemic prevention system,” according to the state-run Korea Central News Agency, and the military was reported to be distributing medication. Officials had earlier ordered all cities and counties across the nation to lock down, saying the coronavirus was spreading “explosively.”

Uncontrolled spread of the virus could be particularly lethal in North Korea. The country’s already meager health system has been undercut and drained of resources by some of the world’s strictest pandemic border closures, cutting off supplies from China. The few international aid organizations that had been operating there have been forced to withdraw.

North Korea has also been facing its worst food crisis in decades, after extensive flooding in 2021, probably leaving its people more malnourished and in poorer health than before.

“Medicines of any kind are scarce in the country, and the health care infrastructure is extremely fragile, lacking medical supplies such as oxygen and other Covid-19 therapeutics,” Lina Yoon, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, wrote in a report, urging governments and the United Nations to try to persuade the country to accept outside aid. “North Koreans are facing a uniquely acute catastrophe, and the world should not turn away,” Ms. Yoon wrote.

The recent restrictions and the isolation of people with suspected coronavirus infections could be catastrophic for North Koreans who were already vulnerable, including children, lactating mothers and older people, a spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement.

Some outside observers of North Korea cautioned against taking state media reports about the pandemic at face value. They cast doubt on whether the country had really been spared past waves of the virus and questioned why the country had suddenly begun giving detailed daily reports on the outbreak.

Choi Jung-hun, who worked as a physician and local public health official in North Korea before fleeing the country in 2011, said the reports could be a way for the government to justify keeping the population under oppressive measures as the economic impact of isolation deepens. He said that the tally of 56 reported deaths as suspiciously low, compared with the reported number of suspected cases, especially given the state of the country’s health care system.

“The internal discontent is high, and they need an explanation,” Mr. Choi said.

Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.

U.S. public schools take a ‘seismic hit’ as enrollment plunges.

No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.

Now educators and school officials are confronting a potentially harsh future of lasting setbacks in learning, hardened inequities in education and smaller budgets accompanying smaller student populations.

“This has been a seismic hit to public education,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. “Student outcomes are low. Habits have been broken. School finances are really shaken. We shouldn’t think that this is going to be like a rubber band that bounces back to where it was before.”

There are roughly 50 million students in the United States public school system.

In large urban districts, the drop-off has been particularly acute. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s noncharter schools lost some 43,000 students over the past two school years. Enrollment in the Chicago schools has dropped by about 25,000 in that time frame.

But suburban and rural schools have not been immune.

In the suburbs of Kansas City, the school district of Olathe, Kan., lost more than 1,000 of its 33,000 or so students in 2020, as families relocated and shifted to private schools or home-schooling; only about half of them came back this school year.

In rural Woodbury County, Iowa, south of Sioux City, enrollment in the Westwood Community School District fell by more than 5 percent during the last two years, to 522 students from 552, in spite of a small influx from cities during the pandemic, the superintendent, Jay Lutt, said. Now, in addition to demographic trends that have long eroded the size of rural Iowa’s school populations, diminishing funding, the district is grappling with inflation as the price of fuel for school buses has soared, Mr. Lutt said.

In some states where schools eschewed remote instruction — Florida, for instance — enrollment has not only rebounded, but remains robust. An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, concluded last month that remote instruction was a major driver around the country, with enrollment falling most in districts most likely to have delayed their return to in-person classrooms.

Private schools have also seen some gains in enrollment. Federal head counts have not yet been released, but both the National Association of Independent Schools and the National Catholic Educational Association have reported increases that total about 73,000 K-12 students during the past two years.

At the same time, some families are leaving their local public schools not because they are abandoning the system altogether but because they have moved to other parts of the country that are more affordable.

Enrollment has surged as well in rural resort areas, driven by the relocation of tech workers and others able to work remotely, particularly after the pandemic set in.

School funding is tied directly to enrollment numbers in most states, and while federal pandemic aid has buffered school budgets so far, the Biden administration has made it clear that the relief is finite. Some districts are already bracing for budget shortfalls.

“When you lose kids, you lose money,” Ms. Roza said. “There’s no hidden piece to this puzzle. You have to close schools and lay off people. And every day you spend trying to avoid that, your kids are getting older and still not reading, and your district is spending money it’s not going to have.”

Few states illustrate the challenge as clearly as California, which educates roughly one in eight of the nation’s public schoolchildren. For the first time in two decades, public school enrollment fell below six million this academic year.

The defections spanned the economic spectrum. In affluent Laguna Beach, Dr. Ann Vu became so fed up with the public school district’s plan for reopening classrooms that, this year, she moved two of her four children to private schools.

“The kids just weren’t doing anything at all,” said Dr. Vu, a dermatologist who said her children were gone for good from the public system. At the Catholic high school where her daughter landed, the once-modest wait list is 200 names long.

Up the freeway in Anaheim Hills, Jaime Parish’s three children also were gone from their former class as the year started. Rendered homeless in late 2020, they had struggled for months to keep up academically, shuffling for almost a year between motels, relatives and Ms. Parish’s 1997 Honda before they quietly stopped attending school entirely.

First their Wi-Fi was spotty. Then Ms. Parish’s mother got Covid-19. Then the car broke and a plan to move to Bakersfield fizzled. By February, a local nonprofit that helped them find housing could find no record of school enrollment for her sons, 17 and 6, or her daughter, 15.

“We tried,” said Ms. Parish, 38, who was camped under a bridge near Disneyland at one point. “But it just got too hard.”

Education officials say it is too soon to know how many students fell through the cracks of the public school system. Before the pandemic, enrollment had been declining overall in California, a function of high housing costs, lower birthrates and restricted immigration. But this year’s decline was tens of thousands of students larger than could be explained by demographic trends, relocations or defections to home-schooling or private schools.

The virus sapped many districts of the personnel to reliably track students who were truant or absent, and the state enrollment census was taken early in the year, during a surge in infections that may have distorted the numbers.

Social service agencies throughout the state, however, say they have seen increasing demand from families whose children arrive for services unsure of their enrollment status.

“We’re seeing a huge influx of people who’ve lost housing,” said Cyndee Albertson, executive director of Family Promise of Orange County, which helped place Ms. Parish and her children in an extended-stay hotel room and enrolled them in nearby schools.

“The parents are afraid if they seek services the protective services will take away their children and the children don’t want to go to school when they can’t wash their clothes or shower,” Ms. Albertson said. “These situations are nothing new, but since the pandemic, they’ve gotten a lot more frequent and a lot worse.”

State education officials have appointed a task force to investigate the decline and to try to determine the whereabouts of unaccounted-for students and their reasons for leaving the public school system. The drop defies a significant infusion of money and manpower to keep students in classrooms, including mass coronavirus testing and outreach for chronically absent students.

Policymakers are straining to avoid further losses. Some districts have resisted reinstating face masks, even amid a resurgence of Covid-19, because of the suspicion that mandates are turning off families. California lawmakers recently postponed the addition of Covid-19 inoculations to the list of required school vaccinations in part because some school superintendents worried about the potential hit on enrollment.

At the Capistrano Unified School District in the suburbs of Orange County, where home buyers have long paid a premium for the public school system, more than 3,000 parents said in a survey last month that they would withdraw their children next school year if Covid-19 vaccines become mandatory for school attendance without at least a “personal belief” exemption.

“We love our school,” Lisa Rogers, 38, a district mother of two, said. “But if my children are forced to wear masks again, or if I’m forced to vaccinate them against my will, I’m going to pull them out and home-school.”

A district spokesman said Capistrano Unified had already lost more than 2,800 students since the pandemic started; the withdrawals suggested by the polls would remove about one student in 15 from classrooms and about $38 million from the district’s roughly $500 million budget next year, if they were to happen.

In some California cities, the situation is already urgent. Oakland’s school system is contemplating the shutdown or merger of nearly a dozen schools over the next two years, an exercise that has unleashed protests, vandalism, a one-day teacher strike and a recent school board resignation. In Southern California, where home prices have been soaring, parents have been fighting the closure of a longstanding neighborhood school in Inglewood.

“It was little by little,” said Mahtab Thorson, an Orange County mother of three, estimating that her middle son has lost some 30 classmates since he entered kindergarten in 2020. “A kid would drop off, a kid would drop off, another kid would drop off. I’d mention a name and he’d say, ‘Oh, they’re not there anymore.’”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

How often can you be infected with the coronavirus?

It’s difficult to quantify how frequently people are reinfected, in part because many infections are now going unreported. Dr. Pulliam and her colleagues have collected enough data in South Africa to say that the rate is higher with Omicron than seen with previous variants.

This is not how it was supposed to be. Earlier in the pandemic, experts thought that immunity from vaccination or previous infection would forestall most reinfections.

The Omicron variant dashed those hopes. Unlike previous variants, Omicron and its many descendants seem to have evolved to partially dodge immunity. That leaves everyone — even those who have been vaccinated multiple times — vulnerable to multiple infections.

“If we manage it the way that we manage it now, then most people will get infected with it at least a couple of times a year,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. “I would be very surprised if that’s not how it’s going to play out.”

The new variants have not altered the fundamental usefulness of the Covid vaccines. Most people who have received three or even just two doses will not become sick enough to need medical care if they test positive for the coronavirus. And a booster dose, like a previous bout with the virus, does seem to decrease the chance of reinfection — but not by much.

At the pandemic’s outset, many experts based their expectations of the coronavirus on influenza, the viral foe most familiar to them. They predicted that, as with the flu, there might be one big outbreak each year, most likely in the fall. The way to minimize its spread would be to vaccinate people before its arrival.

Instead, the coronavirus is behaving more like four of its closely related cousins, which circulate and cause colds year round. While studying common-cold coronaviruses, “we saw people with multiple infections within the space of a year,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York.

If reinfection turns out to be the norm, the coronavirus is “not going to simply be this wintertime once-a-year thing,” he said, “and it’s not going to be a mild nuisance in terms of the amount of morbidity and mortality it causes.”

Reinfections with earlier variants, including Delta, did occur but were relatively infrequent. But in September, the pace of reinfections in South Africa seemed to pick up and was markedly high by November, when the Omicron variant was identified, Dr. Pulliam said.

Reinfections in South Africa, as in the United States, may seem even more noticeable because so many have been immunized or infected at least once by now.

“The perception magnifies what’s actually going on biologically,” Dr. Pulliam said. “It’s just that there are more people who are eligible for reinfection.”

The Omicron variant was different enough from Delta, and Delta from earlier versions of the virus, that some reinfections were to be expected. But now, Omicron seems to be evolving new forms that penetrate immune defenses with relatively few changes to its genetic code.

“This is actually for me a bit of a surprise,” said Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute. “I thought we’ll need a kind of brand-new variant to escape from this one. But in fact, it seems like you don’t.”

An infection with Omicron produces a weaker immune response, which seems to wane quickly, compared with infections with previous variants. Although the newer versions of the variant are closely related, they vary enough from an immune perspective that infection with one doesn’t leave much protection against the others — and certainly not after three or four months.

Still, the good news is that most people who are reinfected with new versions of Omicron will not become seriously ill. At least at the moment, the virus has not hit upon a way to fully sidestep the immune system.

“That’s probably as good as it gets for now,” Dr. Sigal said. “The big danger might come when the variant will be completely different.”

Each infection may bring with it the possibility of long Covid, the constellation of symptoms that can persist for months or years. It’s too early to know how often an Omicron infection leads to long Covid, especially in vaccinated people.

To keep up with the evolving virus, other experts said, the Covid vaccines should be updated more quickly, even more quickly than flu vaccines are each year. Even an imperfect match to a new form of the coronavirus will still broaden immunity and offer some protection, they said.

“Every single time we think we’re through this, every single time we think we have the upper hand, the virus pulls a trick on us,” Dr. Andersen said. “The way to get it under control is not, ‘Let’s all get infected a few times a year and then hope for the best.’”

Pennsylvania’s attorney general, a candidate for governor, is isolating after his positive coronavirus test.