Cases in New York City remain low, even though less than half of city residents are fully vaccinated.

By Jonathan Wolfe and Amelia Nierenberg

This is the Coronavirus Briefing, an informed guide to the pandemic. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.

Cases are surging in crowded U.S. immigrant detention centers.

Israeli data shows that Pfizer’s vaccine is less effective against the Delta variant, but still prevents severe illness, The Wall Street Journal reports.

In another push to boost vaccination rates, Biden called for employers to set up workplace clinics and offer paid time off for workers to get shots.

Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and a vaccine tracker.

The state of New York City

These past few weekends, New York City has really seemed to come alive. People are gathering unmasked in bars and restaurants, parks and beaches are full of picnics and parties, and foot traffic all over the city has seemed to pick up.

And yet, nearly half of the city’s residents — or about 4 million people, including children not yet eligible — have yet to be fully vaccinated, and the Delta variant is gaining a foothold.

For the latest, we spoke to our colleague Joseph Goldstein, who covers health care in New York.

What’s the situation with the Delta variant?

Until the end of May, the Delta variant made up about 8 percent of the cases the city sequenced. As of mid-June, the Delta variant accounted for about 44 percent of cases. Meanwhile, the city’s homegrown variant, named Iota, has totally disappeared. That’s pretty extraordinary given that in mid-April it made up 40 percent of cases. And Alpha, which was first identified in Britain, is down to about 11 percent of cases. The good news, though, is that overall cases have stayed remarkably level. There were around 200 new cases a day in late June, which is lower than they’ve been at any other point since the beginning of the pandemic.

Are there any trouble spots?

If you look at case counts, there’s a bit of an uptick in Staten Island, which averaged in the low 20s for a lot of June, and now is in the low 30s. But that’s not a huge uptick.

The city’s positivity rate is also ticking upward a little bit and is around 0.72 percent. But that’s becoming a less useful metric because there’s not as much large-scale surveillance testing happening with school out.

Source: Read Full Article