Just a few weeks ago, New York City seemed to be a relative bright spot in the United States’ fight against the new crown virus. It is now a hot spot, facing a dazzling peak of cases, scrambled tests, the dilemma of major events and exhausting déjà vu.

A wave of cases triggered by omicron is sweeping across the country’s most populous city, which was a nightmare test case in the country at the beginning of the pandemic. Although health officials stated that the spring of 2020 is no longer an important reason, some Broadway shows abruptly canceled their performances, the requirements for indoor masks have returned, and it is difficult to test them.

“It is disappointing that we have not developed a better system for this, and we have not better prepared for another wave of epidemics,” Jordan Thomas waited for testing at her health clinic in the city on Monday. Said in the fourth hour. Close to downtown Brooklyn.

With the temperature hovering near zero, Nina Clarke joined the team for the third time since symptoms began on Thursday. Once again, she finally walked away.

“I stood there in the cold and said,’I can’t do this,'” she said. “No matter where you go, there is a line.”

As officials and health experts urged people not only to conduct tests but also to bolster vaccines, a private pharmacy in Lower Manhattan lined up for an hour.

“I just want to stay optimistic,” Inga Chen said while waiting for the booster.

After closing some test centers and supporting pop-up test vehicles last month due to insufficient demand, the city once again raced to expand production capacity. The 130,000 tests conducted daily at city-sponsored sites have doubled the number three weeks ago. Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Monday that the city will add 20 fixed sites and three vans this week.it is also Plan to distribute 500,000 home test kits.

Dr. Mitchell Katz, who is in charge of the city’s public hospital system, said that officials did not expect “so much news about omicron” or insufficient supply of home test kits. At the same time, he said, the smaller test site encountered staffing issues this weekend because the workers themselves were infected with the virus.

Katz said the city will now ensure that someone is ready to fill in and take other measures to ease the pressure of testing.

The United States is responding to the rise of omicron and the months-long surge driven by the delta variant of the virus, and infection rates in many other areas of the United States are much higher than those in New York City last week. However, even after nearly two years of viral surprises, the speed of the impact here still makes health experts feel uneasy.

“Well, we have never seen this in #NYC before,” Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor’s public health adviser, said on Twitter on Thursday, referring to the rising number of positives in the previous few days. Detection rate.

From Wednesday to Saturday, nearly 42,600 people in the city tested positive, compared with less than 35,800 for the entire month of November. Since testing has been widely available, the city has never tested positive for so many people in such a short period of time; it is not clear how many people contracted the virus during the first surge in New York City in the spring of 2020.

The number of hospitalizations is also increasing, but at a much slower rate. As of the middle of last week, the number of new enrollments in the city averaged about 110 per day, about twice the number of a month ago. But the average at this time last year was about 230, and it exceeded 1,600 in early April 2020.

At that time, the average daily death toll was close to 800, and it was 100 in late January this year. As of the middle of last week, it was fairly stable, with about a dozen.

The number of hospitalizations and deaths tends to decrease as the number of cases rises and falls. But officials pointed out that in South Africa, where the omicron variant was first discovered, the surge in cases was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in hospitalizations and deaths.

The New York Hospital stated that they have seen moderate but controlled growth.

For example, Dr. John D’Angelo, the general director of Northwell Health, the state’s largest private healthcare system, said that as of Friday, approximately 400 patients were positive for COVID-19 in nearly 20 hospitals in and around New York City. patient. operate. This number is an increase from the approximately 300 people a few weeks ago, but it is only a fraction of the 1,350 in January last year and the 3,500 in early spring 2020.

In addition, according to Dr. Fritz François, director of operations at Katz and NYU Langone Private Medical System Hospital, in general, today’s COVID-19 patients do not need to stay as long as they did in the early days.

Nonetheless, hospitals are preparing for staffing tightening due to infection or exposure forcing staff to stay at home. Katz said that clinics in the public system are shifting to almost all virtual visits so that some nurses and assistants can be transferred to hospitals and testing points.

“We know how to do this. We are ready,” he said in a virtual press conference with the Democratic mayor.

In some respects, this is not comparable to the terrible first attack of the virus. At that time, no one was vaccinated, wearing masks was almost unheard of in New York, and clinicians were only just beginning to learn how to treat COVID-19.

Nevertheless, some public health experts say that officials here and elsewhere have not yet learned how to deal with it.

Dr. Stanley Weiss, a professor of epidemiology at Rutgers University, said: “We have been seeing insufficient response.” He believes that officials should immediately redefine “full vaccination” to include booster vaccination; restrict indoor public spaces to vaccination Vaccines, booster vaccines and frequent wearing masks; and measures such as improving indoor ventilation.

Regardless of the difference, there will still be some echoes in 2020.

The city is weighing whether it can continue a beloved tradition—this time it’s a New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, not the St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2020. Residents once again made decisions about daily activities that suddenly seemed risky.

Earlier this month, Sheldon Rogers attended his office holiday party, and he thought it seemed safe to celebrate with his colleagues at the technology company where he worked in the customer service department.

After the party broke out, he spent nearly three hours in a privately-run emergency care center in Brooklyn waiting for a test on Wednesday.

“It’s kind of reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic,” he mused after testing negative on Monday.