The new variants have most likely undercut the city efforts to lower the rate of positive test results city health officials said this week
Hoping to save the coming tourist season, Europeans are proposing travel certificates. Companies that market learning apps to schools are enjoying a pandemic windfall.
As Americans celebrate a slowing spread of the coronavirus, including in many former hot spots in the South and the Midwest, trends in the Northeast have experts and public officials on edge.
In New York and New Jersey, new cases per capita are at least double the national average. New cases rates are raising concern in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, as well. And, as of last week, a variant of the virus that was first detected in New York City recently made up a growing proportion of new cases there.
The new variants have most likely undercut the city’s efforts to lower the rate of positive test results, city health officials said this week, though they added that the city’s strategy for curbing the spread of the virus has not changed.
Despite expansive vaccination efforts, the citywide seven-day average rate of positive test results has not been able to dip below six percent in months, according to city data. Still, officials have noted improvements in the trajectory of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
As of Tuesday, New York State was reporting a seven-day average of 35 new virus cases a day for every 100,000 residents, according to a New York Times database, trailing only New Jersey, at 41 cases per 100,000. (The nation as a whole was averaging 17 new cases per 100,000 people.)
New York City, at 44 cases per 100,000, is adding new cases at a per capita rate more than five times higher than that of Los Angeles County.
Dr. David Cennimo, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, said a scarcity of data had prevented researchers from definitively linking the trends in the Northeast to the variant first detected in New York City, called B.1.526.
“The U.S. is very limited right now in its sequencing data,” he said. “We really are flying blind.”
The cause for the Northeast’s troubles not entirely unclear, but it most likely results from a combination of factors, said Dr. Stephen J. Thomas, Upstate Medical University’s chief of infectious disease.
While variants might be playing a role, a willingness to gather in groups, unmasked, might also be increasing as the weather warms and more people become vaccinated, he said.
“I think it is a race against time,” Dr. Thomas said. “Every single person that we can get vaccinated or every single person that we can get a mask on is one less opportunity that a variant has.”
Although the rate of new cases is either plateauing or increasing in several Northeastern states, public officials are moving ahead with plans to ease restrictions.
Starting Friday, Rhode Island will allow restaurants to serve at 75 percent occupancy, up from 25 percent. Indoor dining in New Jersey and New York City will go to 50 percent capacity that same day. Outside New York City, indoor dining across the state can expand on Friday as well, to 75 percent, from 50 percent.
During an appearance on CBS’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said the next two weeks will be crucial for New York City in particular. If the rate of cases has been impacted by the B.1.526 variant, “that would cause a lot of concerns.”
The B.1.526 variant was recently, in New York City, outcompeting another contagious variant first detected in Britain, and it can contain a mutation that can stifle the ability of antibodies to combat the virus.
It remains unclear whether that mutation in the B.1.526 variant is leading people to be reinfected, Dr. Gottlieb said. But even as other regions see a high prevalence of the variant first detected in Britain, those states are not experiencing the kind of impact New York City is facing, he said.
“You’re seeing sort of a backup in New York that you’re not seeing in other parts of the country,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “It’s still early, but there’s a lot of reasons to be concerned about the trends in New York City.”