Brooklyn restaurants close one after another due to the advancement of the omicron variant of the coronavirus and the lines in front of the covid-19 testing centers increase every day: New York fears reliving the nightmare of 2020, when the city was the global epicenter of the pandemic.
The state of New York, which includes the city of the same name, announced on Saturday that it had detected a record number of infections for the second consecutive day with around 22,000 positive cases.
In the Greenpoint neighborhood alone, more than a dozen bars and restaurants have temporarily closed due to employee or customer infections. Near McCarren Park, about 30 people line up outside a parked medical van offering rapid testing.
And at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, the popular television show “Saturday Night Live” will not be recorded before a live audience, but with limited crew and cast. The musical guest, Charli XCX, resigned from her performance.
“It looks a lot like March 2020,” says Spencer Reiter, 27, a neighborhood resident who works in finance and comes to get tested with her friend Katie Connolly, a student, because some of her friends have tested positive.
“Really creepy”
“Seeing these rows (…) is like starting over,” Reiter tells AFPTV, while his companion affirms that “all this is really creepy.”
New York was hit hard by the first wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The megalopolis of 8.5 million people, long dubbed “the city that never sleeps”, It remained then completely deserted for many weeks, a scene that looked like something out of a science fiction movie.
The immense avenues of Manhattan were animated only by the distressing sirens of the emergency services. Overwhelmed hospitals and morgues were forced to store the bodies of the victims in refrigerated trucks.
At least 34,000 New Yorkers lost their lives since the spring of 2020 and the city, especially Manhattan, has never really recovered its legendary pre-health crisis effervescence.
“Back to square one”
“We are back where we started, perhaps even much worse” than in March 2020, warns Jolanta Czerlanis, a 54-year-old Pole, as she waits to be tested for the virus after having felt some symptoms.
“It’s very scary and it’s very worrying because we expected it to get better,” says this employee in the gastronomy sector. In recent days, nervousness has gripped the United States at the very rapid spread of the omicron variant. President Joe Biden on Thursday predicted a “winter of serious illness and death” for unvaccinated people.
On December 1, the number of daily new cases nationwide was 86,000 and on December 14, it was 117,000, an increase of about 36% in two weeks. On Tuesday, Covid-19 deaths since March 2020 topped 800,000, the highest number globally, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The variant “ómicron has arrived”, also confirmed the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who on January 1 will leave his place to his successor, Eric Adams. “We have to admit it: It’s moving very fast and we have to be faster,” he told CNN on Friday.
De Blasio imposed mandatory vaccination on municipal officials, that as of December 27 will be extended, in principle, to the entire private sector, some 184,000 businesses and businesses. But nothing says that Adams maintains that measure.
panic on broadway
Just before Christmas, when New York awaits the return of tourism, panic scenes are experienced on Broadway, the famous district of theaters and musicals, where feature cancellations are on the rise due to positive cast cases.
Friday night the cancellation of the next four shows was announced from the show “Rockette” due to “the growing difficulties of the pandemic”, according to the production, quoted by the New York Times.
The musical “Hamilton” was also canceled without notice on Thursday night. “We came by plane for a day just to see ‘Hamilton,'” protested Dara and Myron Abston, a couple from Michigan, annoyed before the AFPTV cameras.
Edouard Massih keeps open the Lebanese store he manages in Brooklyn for the time being. Fear however that this wave of covid-19 causes a new exodus of inhabitants to the suburbs unique to upstate New York, as happened in 2020, when the island of Manhattan emptied out.