The quiet rage of the responsible

AFTER all these years, New York City remains America's premier gateway to the world - a status that brings many good things, but also makes it a place where new variants of the coronavirus can spread fast. The good news is that the city appears to have weathered the rapidly receding Omicron wave relatively well. The hospital system was strained but didn't break - according to city data, "only" 2,846 people died of Covid-19 between Dec 5 and Jan 22.

It is a very different story from what happened during the initial wave in 2020, when many observers suggested that New York was uniquely vulnerable because of its high population density and reliance on public transportation - a diagnosis that proved false as the coronavirus then spread across the nation.

This time, the city was able to cope much better, in part because a great majority of its residents are vaccinated, and they generally follow rules about wearing masks in public spaces, showing proof of vaccination before dining indoors, and so on. In other words, New Yorkers have been behaving fairly responsibly by US standards.