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Some neighborhoods in New York City are seeing a marked increase in new cases of COVID-19 and health officials say low vaccination rates and more communicable variants like the Delta are to blame.
Out of 10 areas of the city with the lowest vaccination rates, six of them also have the highest positivity rates, according to the city’s health department.
The city’s COVID dashboard shows a disturbing increase in the number of overall positive cases which now has the mobile positivity rate at 1.22% after weeks of historic lows.
His new daily average of cases is up 32% in the past seven days from the seven-day average of the previous four weeks. Hospitalizations are down 24% over the same period, while deaths are single-digit, although both are lagging indicators that tend to increase after the number of daily cases.
Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged the rise in the case during his COVID briefing on Monday, but also pointed to the continued low levels of the serious results as cause for optimism. He said the city would double up on ongoing community vaccination campaigns, such as mobile vans and local advocates to encourage the hesitant.
NBC New York’s Tracie Strahan reports.
According to state statistics, New York City’s seven-day positivity average fell from 0.63% on Monday, July 5, to 0.91% on Sunday. Staten Island’s seven-day rate is 1.42%, the highest in the city. Parts of the borough are neighborhoods where vaccination rates are lagging behind, according to the state’s zip code tracker.
New York City Health Commissioner Dr Dave Chokshi also referred to Staten Island specifically on Monday, saying that unvaccinated communities in that borough were fueling much of the increase in new cases in the city scale.
“We have to make sure that as many people as possible are protected over the next few weeks,” Chokshi said.
At this point, New York City officials think the current healthcare guidelines make sense. Virtually all of the serious new cases in the city and the United States are in unvaccinated people, experts say. If more people get vaccinated, those numbers go down.
Nowadays, fewer people are tested for COVID in the city, which may mean those who are not yet vaccinated and are more likely to test positive.
The state health ministry says a higher percentage of cases are linked to more contagious variants spreading wildly in areas with low vaccination rates.
NBC New York’s Tracie Strahan reports.
The highly transmissible COVID delta variant is now linked to alpha as the most dominant strain in New York City, reaching more than a quarter of positive samples tested last week, according to new health data released on Friday.
It is also the most dominant strain in the United States and is fueling an increase in cases in areas with low vaccination rates, officials said. They are pushing again for vaccination to stem the increase.
Nationally, nearly 59% of American adults are fully immunized. The number of complete vaccinations is higher among adult New Yorkers (66%). Sixty-four percent of New Yorkers can say the same. Rates are also lower in some boroughs: 43% of Bronx residents and 45.5% of Brooklyn residents are fully immunized.
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