The sustained low rate of infection has surprised local health officials. But a resurgence may be inevitable, despite the state’s and city’s best efforts.
Health experts in New York City thought that coronavirus cases would be rising again by now. Their models predicted it. They were wrong.
New York State has managed not only to control its outbreak since the devastation of the early spring, but also to contain it for far longer than even top officials expected.
Now, as other places struggle to beat back a resurgence and cases climb in former success-story states like California and Rhode Island, New York’s leaders are consumed by the likelihood that, any day now, their numbers will begin rising.
The current levels of infection are so remarkable that they have surprised state and city officials: Around 1 percent of the roughly 30,000 tests each day in the city are positive for the virus. In Los Angeles, it’s 7 percent, while it’s 13 percent in Miami-Dade County and around 15 percent in Houston. The virus is simply no longer as present in New York as it once was, epidemiologists and public health officials said.
“New York is like our South Korea now,” said Dr. Thomas Tsai of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
But nothing is static about the viral outbreak, experts cautioned. The question now is whether the state, where 32,000 people have died of the virus, can keep from being overwhelmed by another wave, as threats loom from arriving travelers, struggles with contact tracing and rising cases just over the Hudson River in New Jersey.
So far, the opening of beaches in the city has not sparked outbreaks. Credit…September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times
Officials have also been watching warily as cities once seen as models in virus containment struggled with new outbreaks. Hong Kong moved to ban indoor dining and gatherings of more than two people in late July amid a sharp rise in infections. International flights were diverted from Melbourne, Australia, as cases mounted. In more than a dozen interviews, epidemiologists, public health officials and infectious disease specialists said New York owed its current success in large part to how New Yorkers reacted to the viciousness with which the virus attacked the state in April.
