Restaurants and bars closing, Broadway shows canceling and long lines outside the test stands are once again a reality in the city.
Brooklyn restaurants close one after another due to an increase in infections with the omicron variant of covid-19 while queues are extended to get tested in a New York who is afraid of reliving the nightmare of 2020, when the city was the global epicenter of pandemic.
In the Greenpoint neighborhood, more than a dozen bars and restaurants have temporarily lowered their curtains after sudden cases of covid-19 in recent days among employees or customers.
Near McCarren Park, about 30 people line up in front of a parked medical van offering rapid tests.
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“It looks a lot like March 2020 ″says Spencer Reiter, 27, a neighborhood resident who works in finance and gets tested with her friend Katie Connolly, a student, because some of her friends have tested positive.
A past that left consequences
“Seeing these lines (…) is like starting over,” Reiter tells AFPTV, while his companion said that “this is all really creepy.”
New York was hit very hard by the first wave of the pandemic in the boreal spring of 2020.
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The megalopolis of 8.5 million people, long dubbed “the city that never sleeps”, remained by then completely deserted for many weeks, as if it were a science fiction movie.
The vast avenues of Manhattan were animated only by the anguished sirens of the emergency services. Overflowing hospitals and morgues were forced to store the bodies of the victims in refrigerated trucks.
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At least 34,000 New Yorkers lost their lives since spring 2020 and the city, especially Manhattan, never really recovered its legendary effervescence from before the health crisis.
“Ómicron has arrived”
“We are back where we started, perhaps even much worse” than in March 2020, warns Jolanta Czerlanis, a 54-year-old Polish woman, as she waits to be tested for the virus after having felt some symptoms.
“It’s very scary and it is very worrying because we expected to improve ”, says this employee in the gastronomy sector.
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In recent days, nervousness has gripped the United States at the very rapid spread of the omicron variant. President Joe Biden predicted on Thursday a “Winter of serious illness and death” for unvaccinated people.
On December 1, the number of daily new cases nationwide was 86,000 and on December 14, 117,000, an increase of about 35% in two weeks.
On Tuesday, deaths from covid-19 since March 2020 exceeded the 800.000, the largest number worldwide, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The variant “Omicron has arrived”, The Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, also confirmed that on January 1, he will leave his place to his successor, Eric Adams. “We have to admit it: it’s moving too fast and we have to be faster, “he told CNN on Friday.
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De Blasio imposed the mandatory vaccination of municipal officials, which as of December 27 will be extended, in principle, to the entire private sector, some 184,000 shops and businesses.
But nothing says that Adams maintains that measure.
Nightmare on broadway
Just before Christmas, when New York awaits the return of tourism, panic scenes are lived on Broadway, the famous theater and musical district, where cancellations of performances are on the rise due to positive cases in the cast.
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Friday night it was announced cancellation of the next four shows of the show “Rockettes” due to “the growing difficulties of the pandemic,” according to the production, cited by the New York Times.
The musical “Hamilton” was canceled in turn without prior notice Thursday night.
“We flew in for a day just to see ‘Hamilton,’” Dara and Myron Abston, a Michigan couple, protested angrily on AFPTV cameras.
Edouard Massih is currently keeping the Lebanese store he runs in Brooklyn open.
However, fear that this wave of covid-19 cause a new exodus of inhabitants to exclusive suburbs from upstate New York, as happened in 2020, when the island of Manhattan emptied. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
