Two weeks ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/nyregion/covid-school-mas…
Cases Are Rising in Schools. So Why Are Masks Off?
Mayor Eric Adams says he’s following the science in his decision to rescind mask mandates for very young children.
“Our city is back. This is the fashion capital.” Over and over the mayor has instructed New Yorkers to go back to their offices, to return to experiences conducted outside of the house and live it up.
4 days ago:
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/2022/04/04/new-york-covid-1…
Health officials have renewed calls for indoor mask wearing in the Central New York region as COVID-19 cases surged 17% last week and parts of upstate faced some of the worst BA.2 subvariant outbreaks in the country.
15 hours ago:
https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-cases-rise-rapidly-182339505…
The New York Times’ coronavirus tracker for New York City showed that cases had risen by more than 50 percent in the last two weeks while the newspaper’s tracker for D.C. indicated that cases had doubled.
Still, cases in both cities are relatively low compared to where they were just months ago, in January.
The number of new infections on Wednesday for D.C. was more than 700, much lower than the roughly 9,200 reported in early January, according to the Times’ tracker. The number of new infections on Wednesday for New York City was roughly 800 cases, compared to close to 40,000 in mid-January.
In New York City, hospitalizations and deaths related to COVID-19 have both declined over the last 14 days — 17 percent and 53 percent respectively, according to the Times’ tracker. In D.C., while COVID-19 deaths have risen 5 percent in the past two weeks, hospitalizations have declined 39 percent.
https://people.com/health/covid-cases-rising-quickly-in-wash…
While cases have noticeably increased, the death rate for the city has fallen 53 percent, as well as hospitalizations, which have fallen 17 percent.
Washington D.C. is seemingly being hit hard by the next wave of the coronavirus, reporting a whopping 106 percent increase in positive cases since the average two weeks ago, per the NTY. Death rates have remained roughly the same, but hospitalizations have decreased by nearly 40 percent.
Two points to remember when evaluating the above:
Hospitalizations and deaths are lagging infection rates.
It requires a small finite increase of a small number to result in a large increase on a percentage basis.
That said, as we have seen in the past, inflections in the direction of an inflection rate can, with COVID quickly grow exponentially, so attention should be paid.
In a largely vaccinated/boosted population, the hospital systems should be able to handle the loading by those who remain unvaccinated (who make up the vast majority of those being hospitalized/dying) without negatively impacting services required by the balance of the population.
The basic defense for most is to keep their booster status up to date.
Jeff