Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at two sets of statistics — on Covid-19 and crime — that are harder to parse than they may appear. The virus is surging again in parts of New York City, but so far is mainly hitting younger people. And new data shows that shootings have increased this year, yet homicides have dropped.
Compared with a month ago, Covid-19 is spreading twice as fast around New York City. The city is recording 1,500 new cases per day and a 3 percent positivity rate. So far, younger adults are most affected, raising fears that things could get much worse if the increase starts to spread faster among more vulnerable older people.
Yet other numbers offer some hope: Hospitalizations have yet to rise; cases are steadily increasing, not spiking; 800,000 more New Yorker have had booster shots since the last wave peaked; 83 percent of people 65 and older are now fully vaccinated, with 56 percent boosted. And the millions of residents recently infected with the Omicron variant are likely to be well protected from its subvariant BA.2, which is driving the recent rise.
The mixed data — along with mixed messages, with health officials urging caution as the city so far declines to reimpose several recently lifted vaccine and mask mandates — leaves many New Yorkers unsure how best to respond, my colleagues Sharon Otterman and Joseph Goldstein report.
“It’s confusing,” Catherine Jordan, 80, said as she waited for a bus in Queens. “You don’t know what to do.”
Many of us can relate. Rules and recommendations can seem to change as often as the virus mutates. The new wave prompted Mayor Eric Adams to keep, for now, the preschool mask mandate he’d planned to lift. Yet the increase comes, seemingly like clockwork, weeks after the city stopped requiring bars and restaurants to check vaccine records and let public-school students go maskless from kindergarten up. And data are increasingly incomplete since more people nowadays do tests at home, which are generally not reported to city agencies.
So how to judge what’s safe and responsible?
Everyone calibrates risk in their own idiosyncratic, sometimes contradictory way, according to their personal circumstances, risk tolerance and approach to shifting, imperfect information. (Not to mention, it turns out, their attitudes on politics and public health.)
In our family, decisions were already complex before the new subvariant. One child, in a crowded school, still masked most days; the other, privileged with a well-ventilated, high-ceilinged classroom, did not. Figuring that social connection, mental wellness and activity were also important to our health, and our community’s, we saw friends and octogenarian relatives and attended work meetings. Probably not coincidentally, we started to get normal colds again; we worried, using precious at-home tests to rule out Covid-19.
Then, last weekend, my husband tested positive. Not too sick, he retreated to a bedroom. Some of us had little coughs, but were they Covid? Rapid tests said no. The kids kept going to school, under test-to-stay rules. But I stopped visiting my 83-year-old father — leaving him alone in a hospital recovering from a fall. I’ve now tested positive.
At least the next step seems clear: whisking the children to free city sites for PCR tests. (That would be harder, and risk exposing others, if we didn’t have a car.) The good news is, these sites, in my experience, work quickly and smoothly.
To learn about them and other ways to get free testing in the city, read this guide by my colleague Lola Fadulu.
Good luck out there.
Weather
Prepare for showers and possible thunderstorms in the afternoon and late at night, with wind gusts and steady temps in the high 40s during the day and the mid-50s in the evening.
alternate-side parking
In effect until April 14 (Holy Thursday).
The latest New York news
The police have released crime statistics for the first three months of 2022, and they, like the coronavirus data, are a mixed bag. Shootings increased compared with the same period last year, as did crimes like burglaries, robberies and grand larcenies, but homicides declined. The police made more than 4,000 felony arrests last month, twice as many as in last March.
Yet some types of crimes that are increasing are the kind most likely to spread fear, such as subway assaults and attacks on Asians, with 130 hate crime complaints made to the police last year, up from just one in 2019. Also creating fear are shootings of bystanders, many of them in the Black and Latino neighborhoods most burdened by the increase in gun violence. In recent days, 12-year-old Kade Lewin died in Brooklyn as he ate with relatives in a parked car, and a 61-year-old woman was killed by a stray bullet in the Bronx.
I asked my colleague Troy Closson, who reported on the data with Ali Watkins, how to understand the numbers.
What’s the most important thing to know?
The real picture is more complicated than any one person’s perception or one set of data. We’re dealing with the pandemic, many changes and upheaval that continues. It’s hard to draw conclusions from short-term statistics and not possible to predict what’s going to happen. People always have to simplify stats into headlines, but it’s more complex than that. And the burden isn’t equally shared. People in less affected neighborhoods may overestimate the increase in the danger to them, or undercount the impact on others.
How come homicides are down while shootings are up?
That’s something that gun violence experts and sociologists are still grappling with. Some people wonder if improvements in health care play a role, if hospitals save more gunshot victims than they used to. But we’re not sure. In general it’s a struggle to come up with explanations for short-term crime fluctuations. There are many factors, including coincidence.
Why are there more felony arrests?
On one hand, there’s just more people to arrest — more crimes being committed. But the police are also more focused on making gun arrests. A new version of the department’s contentious anticrime unit has been reinstated, but that doesn’t explain most of it.
What we’re reading
METROPOLITAN diary
Coleslaw
Dear Diary:
Early one sunny Saturday in 1975, my friend Beth and I climbed the stairs to the elevated tracks in Far Rockaway and caught the A.
The train bumped and rumbled along the beach roads, into Brooklyn and then through the tunnel into Manhattan. The lights in the car flickered as the train screeched into each stop along the way.
At Washington Square, we jumped off, climbed the stairs to the street and emerged into the bright daylight of a beautiful fall day.
We wandered through Greenwich Village, stopping at shops where teenagers just a few years older and far hipper than us oversaw abundant inventories of art posters, handcrafted jewelry, T-shirts and a broad assortment of other, beautifully random items.
The profusion of goods was beyond exciting to us. We drank in the sights and sounds, flapped enthusiastically over a few small purchases and tried our best to tune into the culture surrounding us.
To save money, each of us had brought a sandwich along. At one point, we found a side street. We sat on a curb between two parked cars and had our picnic.
Beth’s sandwich had coleslaw on it, something I had never thought to add. It created a seismic shift in how I thought about food.
Later, we caught the A, making sure we got home before dark.
— June Holder
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
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