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Seattle, the biggest city in the state where the first U.S. case of Covid-19 was confirmed more than two years ago, will lift its proof-of-vaccination requirement for restaurants, theaters and gyms starting March 1.

And city and county employees who have been working from home for two long years will soon start getting called back into the office.

From coast to coast, other major cities, including Philadelphia, the Twin Cities and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., are doing the same as the rate of Covid-19 infections plummets. Nationally, the average number of new daily cases has dropped by 67 percent in the last two weeks, according to NBC News’ tally.

“Numbers are coming down, and it is time to adapt,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said after the state’s stringent mandate, which required businesses to demand proof of full vaccination or mask-wearing at all indoor venues, expired this month.

On Thursday, Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, became the latest big-city mayor to lift the requirement to show proof of vaccination at restaurants and other public venues.

“The data shows that we are making tremendous progress,” Baraka said in a statement. “Our three-day rolling average for the City of Newark is at 2.5%. We have not been here in a long time.”

In Washington, D.C., where Covid cases have dropped by more than 90 percent since the height of the omicron wave, Mayor Muriel Bowser gave constituents a post-Valentine’s Day present by announcing that proof of vaccination will no longer be required in places like restaurants and entertainment venues starting Feb. 28.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/vaccine-requirements-lifted-us-covid-cases-wane-rcna16700

Gov. Kathy Hochul reported the lowest number of hospitalizations since mid-December

As public health officials and others debate the moves of several Democratic governors this week to relax pandemic restrictions, new coronavirus data released on Saturday for New York show just how far the state has come from its most recent peak in January, when daily new infections and hospitalizations were alarmingly high.

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that 3,883 New Yorkers were hospitalized with the virus on Friday, the lowest since Dec. 19 when the Omicron variant was just taking hold across the state and country.

And Friday’s statewide positivity rate — the share of positive cases among those tests reported — was at 2.5 percent, a far cry from the 23 percent positivity rate recorded just after New Year’s Day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/us/new-york-covid-hospitalizations.html

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Lollapalooza certainly looked scary from above. The Chicago music festival, held at the end of July, brought footage of enormous crowds of people squashed together, presumably shouting and singing and generally spraying aerosols:

Now, however, health officials in Chicago are saying that Lollapalooza does not appear to have been a superspreader event, as some feared it would be.

Out of nearly 400,000 people who attended the festival, just 203 tested positive for the virus, as NBC Chicago reported. The vast majority of people at the event—at least 88 percent—were vaccinated. While the case numbers include breakthrough cases (127 of them), festivalgoers who were unvaccinated were four times as likely to be among those cases.

Yes, it’s possible that those people spread the virus to others after the event, and that testing and self-reporting missed some cases; we also still don’t really know how breakthrough infections connect to long COVID. But this news has to be taken as good, because the numbers from Lollapalooza seem to confirm that the delta variant is not a fundamentally different virus from the one we’ve been enduring since last spring.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/08/lollapalooza-covid-19-breakthrough-crowd-outdoors.html