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CityAndStateNY.com
NEW YORK CITY’S NEW DOCTOR IS IN By Annie McDonough Portrait by Mengwen Cao
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N APRIL 18, flight attendants across the country announced over loudspeakers midflight that a federal mask mandate on planes and public transit had ended, prompting loud celebrations from some, quiet alarm from others, and a reminder for all that Americans are still divided on their views about the pandemic and the receding mandates that had been lauded as important tools for fighting the spread of the virus. Roughly 36,000 feet below those cheers, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan sat in a small, mostly empty conference room – vaccinated, boosted and masked –
May 9, 2022
Tricky, challenging, complex. However you describe it, ASHWIN VASAN faces a tough task in the next phase of the pandemic.
and described the challenge of leading America’s largest city through the next phase of the pandemic. In an interview with City & State, Vasan said New York was in a tricky place. In many ways, the city was on solid footing; 87% of all eligible New Yorkers have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, boosters are widely available, and antiviral treatments are available for free, same-day delivery (with priority given to high-risk patients). But the pandemic has thrown curveballs before – the delta and omicron variants, to name a couple – and epidemiologists continually warn that health care systems must be ready for the possibility that new variants and subvariants could be more transmissible, evade existing vaccines and cause more
