New York City's seven-day average test positivity is now at 2.8% as coronavirus cases reach their highest level since May, according to city health data updated on Monday.
The latest data shows that the city remains precariously close to 3%, the threshold at which Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he would shut public schools and shift completely to remote learning.
Health officials on Monday also revised the prior day average positivity reading upward to 2.9%. The city's test data is routinely changed as more results roll in, and a surge in demand for testing marked the return of long lines at many clinics around the city and longer turnaround times.
Given the delays in results, Dr. Denis Nash, an epidemiology professor, cautioned New Yorkers to wait several days before interpreting the data.
"Backfilling of data can really change the metrics," he told Gothamist on Monday.
Trends over the weekend had suggested that the share of residents testing positive for COVID was starting to decline or at least flatten, but now the trajectory seems to be unclear.
Nash pointed to the fact that average new daily cases were continuing to climb. On Monday, the seven-day average of new cases reached 1,057, a level not seen since May and nearly double that of the city's warning threshold of 550 average cases a day.
NYC's daily and 7-day average positivity rate for COVID
Similar to what he said last week, de Blasio on Monday steadfastly defended his plan to shut down public schools should the positivity go above 3%, despite increasing pressure from parents and Governor Andrew Cuomo.
He has described his July pledge as a "social contract" with teachers and families, made at a moment when so many were nervous and skeptical about reopening schools during a pandemic. Support from the teacher unions was further cemented by a randomized testing protocol for 10% to 20% of students and staffers physically attending schools.
To date, less than a quarter of a percent of more than 123,000 students and staff tested have turned up positive.
Roughly a third of NYC public school students would be impacted by shutting down in-person learning. Fewer than 300,000 students are currently enrolled in the city's blending learning plan, compared to the nearly 1 million students enrolled in the public school system. In-person instruction has also been extremely limited given staffing shortages, with many students being taught in the classroom only once or twice a week.
Nonetheless, a closure would be important symbolically, argued Daniel DiSalvo, a CUNY professor and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies municipal unions.
It also threatens to undo one of the mayor's major achievements during the crisis. The city was the first major school district in the country to reopen its classrooms during the pandemic. Other schools had recently been planning to follow suit.
"New York City is a huge test case," DiSalvo said. "What happens in New York City is really important in terms of what happens nationally and even internationally."
"Shutting down is easier, restarting is harder. If you dial it back, how do you restart again?," he added.
In the face of a New York Times editorial calling for the city to keep schools open and criticism from Cuomo, who has consistently undermined the mayor, de Blasio once again finds himself in an unenviable position. The teachers union led by Michael Mulgrew has made it clear that it is holding the mayor to the 3% trigger.
Mulgrew's position reflects the fact that, like all union leaders, he is responsive to an older constituency that holds more sway and is more vulnerable to getting sick, according to DiSalvo.
On Monday, however, the mayor expressed a willingness to adopt the governor's suggestion of adding more testing in schools as a way of restarting schools faster should they close. But he also said that there are ongoing discussions with the union and hinted at a possible compromise.
"We're going to look at different approaches, including what's happening at the schools across the board and then what's going on in specific schools, and what we can do to ensure they are safe, including potentially additional testing," de Blasio said at a news conference Monday morning. "There's a lot of good discussion going on about how to strike that balance."
There are no indications that Cuomo, who has been granted emergency powers because of the pandemic, will override de Blasio. Cuomo's proposal that schools should close on a case-by-case basis came as a mere suggestion, and he cited parents and testing data as the key driver to such a policy shift.
In the days since schools reopened in September, de Blasio has demonstrated flexibility in revising his policies, changing the start dates for in-person learners while also closing schools in hot zones experiencing exceedingly high COVID-19 rates. Both of those decisions came following pressure from the teachers union.
