The United States breaks records of infections with more than 100,000 a day

Two men wait to be tested for COVID at the ferry terminal in Staten Island, New York, this Thursday.BRENDAN MCDERMID / Reuters

New York is a city used to queues.

You have to be patient even to enter a supermarket, but the pandemic has added two tumultuous, massive modalities: the hunger queues of those most affected by the closure of the economy in spring, and the long waits in front of laboratories or hospitals that carry out the covid-19 test.

These last rows fatten daily, avidly, while the city seems doomed to a second wave if measures are not taken;

"It is dangerously close," the mayor, Bill de Blasio, warned on Monday.

At street level, what is surprising to any foreign observer is not that the city is being splashed by another wave, but that it is not completely engulfed by a tsunami: people without masks in the subway, in elevators, in shops or boarding lounges;

also in airplanes, taxis and trains;

among those who cover up, half forget to cover their nose.

The description not only reflects the atmosphere in the city of skyscrapers, but also that of much of the United States, according to the sinister records of infections, on the rise.

Since day 4, when for the first time 100,000 new confirmed cases were reached throughout the country in a single day, that figure has been exceeded every day - in six of them breaking a new record -, until reaching more than 160,000 this Thursday (more than a million so far this month);

1,450 deaths on Tuesday and some 67,000 hospital admissions, more than in the spring.

Public health experts warn of the literal hell that winter can bring, with cold as an adjunct to the pathogen.

Since February, more than 10.5 million cases have been registered and the total number of deaths exceeds 242,000.

The worst balance in the world.

The latest restrictions in New York, adopted this Wednesday by the governor, Andrew Cuomo, limit the capacity at social gatherings (10 people indoors, 25 outdoors) and force bars, restaurants and gyms to close at ten o'clock at night, considering them an important source of contagion "given the imminence of Christmas", and when the daily rate of positivity in the State has reached 2.9% (2.4% in the average of the last seven days), with more than 1,600 admissions, Governor Cuomo recalled, compared to 2.26% in the city, according to data from the State and New York Departments of Health, respectively.

3% is the theoretically insurmountable threshold, says the WHO, which, if exceeded, would force schools to close again, or "a new partial closure of the economy," warned the mayor without hot cloths.

The new measures, which go into effect this Friday, come a day after California and several Midwestern states increased restrictions to avoid a greater evil.

Nothing more graphic or terrifying than the deployment of mobile morgues in El Paso (Texas): 10 refrigerated trucks to relieve the pressure on funeral homes and hospitals.

But it also scares the 19% positivity registered in Newark (New Jersey), an important communications hub that radiates to New York and the northeast of the country, and that epidemiologists fear due to its diffusing effect.

In the city, the largest in New Jersey, a curfew was decreed two weeks ago: everything closed at eight in the afternoon, except for essential businesses.

The fact that New York State is sandwiched between two others with alarming rates, New Jersey and Connecticut, and the difficulty in identifying outbreaks - transmission is already community-based - are factors that complicate the evolution of the disease in the city of skyscrapers, which was the epicenter of the epidemic at its dawn, but believed to be safe after the confinement of the first wave, which cut off the transmission.

De Blasio's message on Monday was very clear: This is the last chance to avoid falling back to spring levels.

After the rebound detected in September and October in Brooklyn, originating in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, tracing the origin of the infections has become an impossible task, local authorities maintain.

Barbara Felt, web designer, was the last in a line of a hundred people outside an Upper West Side dispensary on Thursday morning.

“My boyfriend has tested positive, although he wears a mask.

But he has had to go back to work, and there are 60 people in his department.

We have not cut ourselves too much when it comes to seeing friends, we go out almost every day ”, he explained, while the queue circled two blocks under a fine rain.

“I have read that it is bad that the ventilation in the buildings is so poor, but we do not know what could have happened.

Maybe at the office, or maybe at a party at a friend's house, the truth is that we take off the mask because we are close and we trust each other ”, he confessed.

A poll released this week maintains that New Yorkers are the most reluctant to return to their jobs, but you only have to look at the tons of cardboard, packaging and soda cans that accumulate each afternoon at the end of the work day in the sidewalks in Midtown to check office buildings are up and running.

Next to the dispensary, which serves most insurers, a private center ($ 200 the PCR, about 169 euros) registers a discreet influx.

Because the health coverage of each also discriminates when facing the pandemic.

The network of public hospitals in New York, which do the test for free, can't keep up.

In front of the Gotham-Syndeham, in Harlem, about 60 people crowded this Thursday half an hour before the opening of the laboratory.

“It is very slow because here we come from insured to people who do not have coverage, and that delays it a lot.

I know this because I come every two weeks, they force me at work ”, explained Roberta, a physiotherapist.

Serena, a kindergarten teacher, came for the same reasons: “I have to take the test every week, but I wear a mask all the time, I wash my hands and avoid closed places;

they are very simple protection measures that not everyone contemplates.

It is incredible that people at this point continue to refuse to wear a mask, they have believed Trump's lies and see it as a political statement.

It is absurd, as well as dangerous ”.

Mary Loise, the owner of a small restaurant a couple of blocks from Central Park, was torn between a sea of ​​doubts.

“If clients get sick we are not going to do any business, that is clear to me.

But forcing us to close at ten is not going to do anything.

We have spent a fortune improvising and preparing a terrace, and now we will have to prepare it for the winter, with the considerable added expense ”, he explained.

"And all on the eve of a very good period for the box, Thanksgiving, Christmas ... If whoever decides to confine the city again, it will be disaster, but it is worse to die, there is no doubt about that."

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