Brooklyn Jewish officials warn of new COVID cases amid rising fear of a second wave
A member of the Orthodox Jewish community wears a face mask as he joins hundreds attending the funeral for a rabbi who died from the coronavirus in the Borough Park neighborhood which has seen an upsurge of (COVID-19) patients during the pandemic on April 05, 2020 in the Brooklyn Borough of New York City. Hospitals in New York City, which has been especially hard hit by the coronavirus, are facing shortages of beds, ventilators and protective equipment for medical staff. Currently, over 122,000 New Yorkers have tested positive for coronavirus. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Image by Getty Images
(JTA) – With cases of COVID-19 rising over the last several weeks in Orthodox communities in the New York City area, a synagogue in Brooklyn and a Jewish ambulance group issued warnings for people to continue taking precautions against the virus.
Hatzoloh of Rockland County, which serves a number of large Orthodox communities in Monsey, New York, and the surrounding areas just north of New York City, said it had received a number of calls from people reporting COVID-like symptoms and requiring hospitalization.
“The Coordinators and Board of Hatzoloh of Rockland County urges all members of the community to please wear masks while in places that you cannot effectively social distance,” they wrote in a letter Monday.
Meanwhile, Congregation Khal Shaarei Zion Bobov, a Brooklyn synagogue of the Bobover Hasidic movement, warned the community that several people in the neighborhood had contracted the coronavirus, with some ending up in the intensive care unit. The notice, written in Hebrew, warned those who do not have antibodies or those who are older or have underlying health conditions to maintain social distancing or wear masks where distancing is not possible, practices that have not been common lately in the community.
The notice also mentioned cases of reinfection after several months. Local doctors in Orthodox communities in Brooklyn have seen cases of suspected reinfection, causing them to warn that those who were sick in the first wave of cases should not assume that they are safe. Those cases have been milder in their symptoms so far, the doctors have said, in keeping with what would be expected from a typical immune response.
The warnings come after an announcement last week by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio of 16 new cases in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park, home to the city’s largest Hasidic community, with several of the cases connected to a large wedding. In other communities in the New York City area and down the East Coast, doctors and local rabbinical associations warn of worrying upticks in COVID cases that threaten the safe reopening of schools and in-person services on the High Holidays.
Several Orthodox communities were hit particularly hard by the virus earlier in the pandemic, with members of some even believing that their communities may have achieved some measure of herd immunity as a result. Even so, large numbers of people who have not contracted the virus and recovered still remain vulnerable.
The post Brooklyn synagogue and Orthodox ambulance corps warn of new COVID cases amid rising fear of a second wave appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
