People line up to get tested for Covid-19 in New York City on December 17, 2021 (AFP / Ed JONES)
Brooklyn restaurants are closing one after another due to a surge in contamination, queues to get tested are growing: New Yorkers are currently afraid of reliving the nightmare of 2020, when the city was there global epicenter of the Covid-19 epidemic.
In the Greenpoint neighborhood, more than a dozen bars and restaurants have temporarily lowered the curtain after sudden cases in recent days among their employees or customers.
Near McCarren Park, about 30 people line up in front of a parked medical van that offers rapid tests.
“It looks a lot like March 2020,” blows Spencer Reiter, 27, a resident of the neighborhood, working in finance and coming to be tested with his friend Katie Connolly, a student, because their friends are positive for Covid-19.
– “Really creepy” –
“Seeing these lines (…) it’s as if everything was starting over again,” he told AFPTV, his partner finding “it really scary”.
A man gets tested for Covid-19 in front of a van parked in a New York street on December 17, 2021 (AFP / Ed JONES)
It must be said that New York was brought to its knees by the first wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2020.
The megalopolis of 8.5 million people, long nicknamed “the city that never sleeps”, had been completely deserted for weeks, like in a science fiction film.
The immense avenues of Manhattan were animated only by the anxiety-provoking sirens of the emergency services, with overwhelmed hospitals and morgues forced to store the bodies of victims in refrigerated trucks.
At least 34,000 New Yorkers have lost their lives since the spring of 2020 and the city, especially Manhattan, has never really regained its legendary effervescence before the health crisis.
– “Back to square one” –
“We are in fact back to square one, maybe even much worse” than in March 2020, alarms Jolanta Czerlanis, a 54-year-old Polish woman, who came to be tested because she felt some symptoms.
“It is very scary and it is very worrying because we hoped that it would get better”, says this employee in the restaurant.
In recent days, nervousness has won the United States in the face of the very rapid spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. 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 on average; on December 14, it was 117,000, an increase of about 35% in two weeks. And in the country officially the most bereaved in the world by this pandemic, the death toll from Covid-19 has exceeded 800,000 on Tuesday since 2020, according to the report from Johns Hopkins University.
View of the Manhattan skyline and New York’s East River on December 14, 2021 (AFP / Ed JONES)
The “Omicron has arrived” variant, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also noted.
“We have to admit it: he is moving very quickly and we have to be faster,” the democratic councilor told CNN on Friday, a few days before his handover on January 1 with his elected successor, Eric Adams.
Mr. de Blasio imposed compulsory vaccination on municipal officials, as well as from December 27, in principle, on the entire private sector, ie 184,000 businesses and businesses. But nothing says Mr. Adams will enforce this decision.
– Panic on Broadway –
Just before Christmas, while New York awaited the return of its tourists, there was a bit of panic in the famous Broadway theater and musical district where the cancellations of performances were on the increase, because of positive cases within the troops.
People line up for rapid Covid-19 tests on a New York street on December 17, 2021 (AFP / Ed JONES)
Last victim Friday night, the next four shows of the “Rockettes” at Radio City Music Hall were canceled due to “growing difficulties of the pandemic”, according to the production cited by the New York Times.
As for the musical “Hamilton”, it was canceled without warning Thursday evening: “We really came by plane for a day only to see + Hamilton”, protested annoyed in front of AFPTV Dara and Myron Abston, a couple from Michigan.
Edouard Massih, who runs a Lebanese grocery store in Brooklyn, remains open to him for the moment, but he fears that this wave of Covid-19 will cause a new exodus of inhabitants to the north of New York, in green and upscale suburbs , as was the case in 2020 when the island of Manhattan had emptied.
© 2021 AFP
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