“When you look across the board, everything seems like it is going in the right direction,” Dr. She noted that by nearly every metric there seemed to be less coronavirus circulating in the city. “We’ve peaked, I think, and now we’re coming down the slope,” she said. Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University, was more optimistic. “We are in a very precarious place right now and the next few weeks are going to be critical.”ĭr. Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at the City University of New York. “I really do hope that the trends that show the Delta surge going in the downward direction stay that way, but I’m not sure, and if we look at what happened in the U.K., there was a second surge,” said Dr. That was more than twice the rate in Queens, which had the lowest virus levels. Staten Island has had by far the highest level of transmission, with one in every 417 people testing positive in a recent seven-day period. More than 100 people were being hospitalized each day.īut over the past three weeks, new cases and other indicators have begun dropping gradually, raising hopes that infection rates are subsiding. The rate of new cases was highest among young adults, 18 to 34. In mid-August, nearly 2,000 people a day on average were testing positive in New York City, a tenfold increase from earlier in the summer. Here’s where things stand: A possible plateauįor the moment, the rate of new cases and hospitalizations are down from their summer peak. With the school year starting, and municipal agencies and some large companies mandating a return to the office, the old weekday rhythms - families rushing out the door, morning commutes, lunch meetings - are about to return for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, even as levels of the virus remain relatively high. Dave Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner, described the current moment in an interview as a plateau, and warned that the level of virus transmission - at some 1,500 cases per day - “remains at too high a level for us to be complacent about where we are.” But others are bracing for an uptick of cases as school starts.ĭr. AJSS also publishes book reviews and review essays of works published in various languages, research notes on Asian societies, and short essays of special interest to students of the region.The Delta variant’s rapid spread in New York City this summer has slowed in recent weeks, convincing some epidemiologists that the city’s third coronavirus wave has begun to ebb. AJSS publishes internationally peer-reviewed research articles, special thematic issues and shorter symposiums. AJSS also welcomes humanities-oriented articles that speak to pertinent social issues. AJSS strongly encourages transdisciplinary analysis of contemporary and historical social change in Asia by offering a meeting space for international scholars across the social sciences, including anthropology, cultural studies, economics, geography, history, political science, psychology, and sociology. It is committed to comparative research and articles that speak to cases beyond the traditional concerns of area and single-country studies. AJSS provides a unique forum for theoretical debates and empirical analyses that move away from narrow disciplinary focus. The Asian Journal of Social Science is a principal outlet for scholarly articles on Asian societies published by the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.