the second wave of coronavirus weakens

After months of consistently high coronavirus cases, New York City appears to have finally reached a tipping point. The second wave in the city is diminishing, six months after its start.

This was stated on Tuesday by New York City Health Commissioner Dr Dave Chokshi.

Throughout the month of April, virus cases, hospitalizations and deaths were down, and epidemiologists attribute it to increased vaccination rate, in addition to the arrival of a warm climate, which attracts people to the great outdoors.

Since a second peak of nearly 8,000 cases in a single day in January, New York an average of around 2,000 cases of the virus per day until last week.

Public health officials say that by July, if the city stays on its current trajectory, that number could drop below 600 cases per day, perhaps less.

But they also warn that uneven immunization coverage This could lead to a situation where the virus persists in some parts of the city, but not in others.

Immunization inequalities

Manhattan, the neighborhood with the highest median household income, is much more vaccinated than the poorest Bronx, reflecting the mistrust of vaccines in parts of the city and highlights the long-standing inequalities in healthcare that the virus has exposed.

And there are signs that the pace of vaccines is slowing. So far, 52% of adults in the city have received at least one dose.

“We cannot confuse progress with victory, and these next two months in particular are critical to our vaccination campaign and our goals to reach as much of New York City as possible,” Dr Chokshi said in an interview on Tuesday.

“We will redouble our efforts in terms of thinking about access and ensuring that the vaccine is as accessible as possible,” he noted.

A long second wave

The second wave in New York City was not as bad as the devastating first wave that hit the city in March and April 2020. But epidemiologists and public health officials are surprised how long it lasted.

Since this wave started last fall, nearly 50,000 New Yorkers have been hospitalized with Covid-19.

The figure peaked in early January, with nearly 6,500 cases per day on average during the worst week. Then new infections started to decline, but stabilized at a high of almost 4,000 new cases per day throughout March.

The number of cases was stable, but the epidemic was changing. The vaccines had arrived and the number of vaccines was increasing every day to tens of thousands.

But even as more and more people are protected, the virus has become more transmissible. Two new variants were quickly replacing other forms of coronavirus. Both were significantly more contagious than last year’s virus.

Vaccines and new variants

Public health experts have spoken of a standoff between the variants and the vaccination campaign.

For a while there was a stalemate. At the end of March, variants appeared to increase slightly and new daily cases appeared to increase briefly.

Then the number of new cases started to decline in early April, dropping from almost 4,000 cases per day at the start of the month to around 2,000 per day.

The seven-day positive test rate has also declined and is now between 3% and 4%, according to city data. This is the lowest since the fall, but still much higher than its low of 1% last summer.

Far from the end

More than 1,500 Covid-19 patients remain hospitalized in New York, and the death toll within days is still around 40.

Epidemiologists and city officials warn the outbreak is not close to ending in the city, despite promising signs.

Hospitalizations drop faster for people 65 and older, a priority group for vaccines from the beginning, than for other groups.

But while some neighborhoods now have positivity rates below 1%, in others the rate is six or seven times higher.

“I feel good that we are starting to see an effect of the vaccine on transmission here,” said Dr. Denis Nash, epidemiologist at the City University of New York School of Public Health.

“But we still have a long way to go, and there are so many New Yorkers and neighborhoods that are hit hardest by this pandemic that they are being left behind,” he said.

The most affected areas

Overall, Manhattan has a 1.5% positivity rate, and in some wealthy areas, the positivity rate is less than 1% in the past seven days.

However, the virus remains a significant threat in corners of the city like Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood where a large part of the inhabitants are Latino or Asian.

There, the positivity rate is still 6%.

The most contagious strains

The newer and more contagious forms of the virus, including B.1.1.7., The variant first detected in Britain, and B.1.526, the variant first detected in New York, accounted for more of 75 percent of the cases analyzed. in this city in the week starting April 5, the latest data available.

There was also a slight but worrying increase in the variant detected for the first time in Brazil, which accounted for nearly 3 percent of sequenced cases. This is particularly concerning because in Brazil, this variant has been shown to disrupt immunity against a previous infection.

Pero en la ciudad de Nueva York, hasta ahora, parece que la combinación de inmunidad previa a la infección e inmunidad a la vacuna ha evitado un gran aumento en los casos debido a las variants, como la que afectó a Gran Bretaña después de las vacaciones winter. Cases in the city are now on the decline even as the proportion of cases that are variants increases. This is encouraging news for epidemiologists.

Laboratory studies have also revealed positive news showing that the two main vaccines used in the United States, Pfizer and Modern, they are efficient against the New York variant, which is responsible for about 40 percent of new cases.

Speed ​​up vaccination

Last summer, in the months following the first wave, the daily number of cases averaged less than 300. Dr Chokshi said he expects the number of cases to drop below 550 per day, a threshold the city set as a target last year, for July.

However, to get there, public health officials say expected to increase vaccination rates citywide.

Areas with low vaccination rates, they say, could allow localized germs, similar to those the city saw in 2019 with measles. For this reason, slow, person-to-person efforts to immunize people must take center stage.

In early April, it was not uncommon for 100,000 doses of vaccines per day in town from New York. But the pace of vaccines has started to slow over the past two weeks. Distrust of vaccines is an important factor. 45,000 doses were administered on Monday.

The New York Times, in particular

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