I am there on WNYC, the New York City Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner, Dr. Ashwin

Vossen, is going to join us now.

One reason is that since last month, New York State and in fact a big part of the Northeast

have seen an uptick in COVID-19 cases, this seems now to be an annual summer surge in

addition to the annual fall and winter surges where rising cases might be expected as

people tend to socialize more indoors, but why in the summer?

So joining us to discuss this and more is Dr. Vossen, Commissioner of the New York City

Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Commissioner Vossen, always good to have you.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Good to be back, Brian.

How big is this uptick in the city?

Well, we've been seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases since early July.

As we might expect, hospitalizations have lagged and we're starting to see an increase

in those relative to recent weeks.

Overall levels still remain very low.

We had similar levels of cases and hospitalizations back in March.

As we've seen over the past year plus, when it comes to hospitalizations, the majority

of them still are people who are hospitalized for something else and then incidentally test

positive for COVID rather than being hospitalized directly due to our complication of COVID.

Other positive signs despite this uptick are that we're not seeing any significant increase

in severity, measured as ICU admissions or certainly deaths.

And we're not seeing any issues with bed capacity or staffing issues.

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