nyc health department

In a talk at the American Museum of Natural History, DEP’s Jonathan Hoffman discussed the utility and challenges of testing sewers for infectious diseases.

Nearly three years into the city’s wastewater surveillance program, NYC has neither a local dashboard nor a clear strategy for how testing results are used.

New York City health commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan offers advice for facing and treating the tripledemic.

The city is averaging about 1,100 daily emergency department visits due to flu-like illness, which is double the number from late October.

The city’s program uses scanners that you’d typically find in a graduate school chemistry labs, allowing them to detect fentanyl or other dangerous substances in the drug supply.

Neither Tuesday's announcement nor a health advisory from Monday contained a new mandate for mask wearing, despite city policy recommending such a measure.

Overall, New Yorkers who weren’t fully vaccinated have comprised 98 percent of cases, hospitalizations and deaths since the start of the year.

“Definitely, it will make me feel completely more at ease,” Yessmin Egipciaco said of getting a dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for her 89-year-old mother Rosa Elena.

Other variants from the United Kingdom and South Africa are also rising.

"It’s important to give families and communities, and the city as a whole, a sense of the magnitude of what we are going through," Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the NYC Health Commissioner, told us.