Business owner community. when you look at the rest of the country we are seeing a significant uptick throughout var yaz parts of the country. in the northeast and if you zoom in on new york state that is also experiencing an extra fast increase specifically in the central part where average cases have doubled. two offshoots of the ba.2 virus are likely to blame causing more than 90 infections in central new york and the finger lakes region. it s unclear if we ll see this overtake the ba.2 variant in other parts of new york. we should remember at this point the daily reported cases not only in new york but throughout much of the country is just a fraction of where we were at the height of the omicron surge but really what we heard from the state commissioner in new york is a reminder the variants are not new but the tools to combat them also aren t new. we re talking about getting fully vaccinated, boosted, testing if you ve been exposed