It wasn’t until this summer, a year after Wu arrived, that the city finally felt somewhat normal — an impression that proved fleeting, as New York yet again finds itself at the center of the pandemic. In recent weeks, the highly contagious omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has quickly spread through the city, which now has one of the highest rates of new cases in the country despite taking more precautions than many communities and having a vaccination rate higher than the national average. So far, hospitalizations have remained comparatively low, given the high number of infections, although the number of children hospitalized with covid-19 has increased dramatically this month.
