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NEW YORK CITY: On the day that New York City set a one-day coronavirus case record for the third time in a week, an entire subway line that connects Queens to Manhattan was closed because so many transit workers had fallen ill. Other lines faced delays.
The Fire Department, where nearly a third of paramedics were out sick, begged New Yorkers not to call 911 unless it was a real emergency, after a spate of calls from mildly ill people who were just looking for an ambulance ride to a hospital to get a Covid test.
And while New Yorkers across the city were lining up scores deep to get coronavirus tests, 20 CityMD locations that provide those tests were closed because of staffing shortages caused by the virus.
New York City — exhausted, beleaguered and riddled with coronavirus thanks to the Omicron variant — remains officially open. But as Year 2 of the pandemic makes way for Year 3, the city is operating at half speed simply because so many people are sick.
From restaurants to libraries to courts to cruise ships to city agencies, services have been reduced, businesses temporarily closed and events canceled as the entire city struggles to navigate through a sort of Omicron haze.
The city logged 39,591 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the governor’s office said, smashing the old record, set on Christmas Eve, by more than 8,000. More than 100,000 people have tested positive just since Christmas Day.
On the city’s website, the test positivity rate was literally off the chart: The chart goes up to only 20 percent, and the seven-day average stood at 20.97 percent....
PLEASE READ MORE HERE:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/nyregion/covid-new-york-omicron-shut…
