Mayor Adams, health officials urge caution over holidays as COVID, RSV, flu viruses spread

With the holiday season here, Mayor Adams urged New Yorkers to be on guard against a triple threat of illnesses that have been on the rise for weeks.

“We’re in a significant moment right now,” Adams said Tuesday in City Hall about the onslaught of COVID, RSV and the flu. “How do we enjoy the holidays and spread love without spreading the virus?”

Adams and his Health Department Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan offered a simple answer to the question: Get your flu shots, make sure you’re up to date with COVID vaccinations, wear a mask in crowded settings and stay home if you’re sick.

Their concerns stem from spikes in COVID and flu cases in the city even as cases of RSV, which disproportionally affects young children and seniors with preexisting conditions, have declined in recent weeks but are still high, city officials said.

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In the week of Dec. 10, the number of positive RSV — respiratory syncytial virus — test results had dipped to just under 2,500 compared to 5,000 a week in early November. In early September, only about 500 people had tested positive in a week.

Flu cases are rising at a much higher clip than they have in the last four years. As of Dec. 11, the number of people who tested positive for the flu in a week’s time was slightly under 18,000. In the four years prior, the number of cases recorded for that week were all well below 3,000.

COVID is also on the rise, but at nowhere near the rate it was during the height of the pandemic. As of Saturday, the seven-day average of new daily COVID cases hit 3,636. On Sept. 18, that number stood at 2,016. The seven-day average for COVID hospitalizations has also increased 34% from mid-November through Dec. 12.

Vasan attributed the rise in COVID cases to the colder weather, more people mixing with one another indoors and as a byproduct of “us getting back to some semblance of normalcy in the way that we move about the world and live our lives.”

“Some of this is to be expected, but it is something we’re watching very carefully,” he said.

To combat the three maladies, Adams announced Tuesday that all 11 hospitals in the city’s Health + Hospitals network are offering the updated Pfizer COVID vaccine to children between the ages of 6 months and 4 years old, and many of the city’s mobile COVID testing vans will be giving out Paxlovid for those who test positive for COVID and Tamiflu prescriptions for flu sufferers.

During the worst days of COVID, staffing shortages plagued some hospitals. But Vasan said that’s not a problem at the moment, noting that the “vast majority” of hospitals in the city are not reporting severe staffing shortages in their emergency and pediatric divisions.

Adams has not appeared to make COVID, or public health in general, a top priority of his administration. By the time he took office, vaccines for COVID had already been out for months, and Adams seemed eager to be the mayor who moved past the pandemic, after his predecessor Bill de Blasio focused much of his last two years on the virus.

Adams’ spokesman Fabien Levy noted that the last time Adams held a press conference on the virus was in the fall when he got his COVID booster shot. That same day, he announced that the city’s coronavirus vaccine mandates for private sector workers and student athletes were coming to an end.