One New York City subway line was suspended on Wednesday and five others were running with delays because so many workers were out sick.
Twenty City MD locations, where thousands of New Yorkers go to get tested for the coronavirus, were closed because of staffing shortages caused by the virus.
The Police Department has canceled days off for any officer healthy enough to work. Nearly one in three paramedics are out sick, and the Fire Department begged New Yorkers not to call 911 unless they were truly experiencing an emergency, after a spate of calls from people who were just looking for an ambulance ride to a hospital to get a coronavirus test.
Broadway shows are closing even as others reopen. Libraries are shuttering left and right.
New York City is exhausted, beleaguered and riddled with coronavirus thanks to the Omicron variant. More than 110,000 people have tested positive just since Christmas Day, and the positivity rate in some neighborhoods is approaching 30 percent.
Some hospitals in the city are under stress: Mount Sinai Health System said Wednesday it was deferring elective surgeries where possible.
But as Year Two of the pandemic limps offstage to make way for Year Three, New York remains open, with piecemeal slowdowns and closings.
Omicron, Mayor Bill de Blasio told New Yorkers shortly before Christmas, would provide the city with a “challenging few weeks,” banking on the uncertain proposition that the variant would follow the trend set in South Africa, one of the first countries to identify it. But because Omicron appears to cause milder disease than earlier iterations of the virus, because more than 80 percent of New Yorkers are fully vaccinated, and because he has ordered a vaccine mandate for all private-sector employers, he said he did not see a need for a 2020-style lockdown.
Testing is central to New York City’s plan to keep the largest U.S. school district open in the new year. The city announced on Tuesday that it would eliminate its policy of quarantining entire classrooms exposed to the coronavirus, and would instead use a ramped-up testing program to allow students who test negative and do not have symptoms to remain in school.
And so the city is carrying on with plans for a limited Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop, even as the chairman of the City Council’s Health Committee urged Mr. de Blasio on Wednesday to cancel the celebration — as Rome, Paris and Tokyo have done with theirs.
Mayor-elect Eric Adams one-upped Mr. de Blasio, announcing on Wednesday that he would take the oath of office in Times Square shortly after the midnight ball drop.
Gov. Kathy C. Hochul announced a new statewide record of 67,000 daily cases on Wednesday — nearly 20,000 more than the previous record set Dec. 24 — and said that Covid-related hospital admissions jumped 10 percent in a single day and that deaths neared 100 for the first time in months.
New York City also set a record, with 39,591 new cases announced Wednesday by the governor’s office, nearly 30 percent more than the old record of 31,024, also set Dec. 24. And the city’s Covid hospitalizations are up to more than 2,700 — but the number of Covid patients in intensive care was 350 earlier this week, less than half the number during last winter’s surge.
Children are also filling up hospital beds in many parts of the country, especially in New York. State officials issued a warning on Christmas Eve after a fourfold increase in hospitalizations in children under 18 in New York City between Dec. 5 and last week. About half of the admissions were children under 5, who are not eligible for vaccination, according to the New York Department of Health.
The virus’s pressure was evident in many different arenas in the city. In the high-profile sex trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate, the judge ordered the jury on Tuesday to deliberate through the New Year’s weekend if necessary, because it was only a matter of time before jurors or others involved might have to quarantine, risking a mistrial.
Signs of a half-shut city were everywhere. The W subway line was suspended early Wednesday morning. Clicking the status button for the A, D, E, N and R trains brought up a message: “You may wait longer” for a train, it said. “We’re running as much service as we can with the train crews we have available.”
In Downtown Brooklyn, Wanda Ortiz, who has had a fever, body aches and a scratchy throat since Christmas, summoned the strength to head over to the CityMD on Atlantic Avenue Wednesday morning to get tested. The clinic was dark.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ms. Ortiz, 68, said as she read the note on the door. She wandered off to find another testing site, hoping she would not have to stand in line too long in the cold.