(CNN) Out with the old, in with the cold.

With much of the Midwest and Northeast already besieged by freezing temperatures, ice and snow, the weather is going from bad to worse -- and spreading to the South -- just as revelers rang in the new year.

In New York, hundreds of thousands of people packed Times Square in the 9-degree Fahrenheit weather, with a wind chill of 4 degrees below zero, to watch the 2018 ball drop and confetti rain down on the street. The frigid temperature made it the second-coldest New Year's Eve ball drop on record in New York. The coldest ball drop in New York City still holds at 1-degree Fahrenheit in 1917.

But authorities had said they didn't expect the frigid temperatures to cool revelers' spirits.

"There's a lot of brave people in New York City and the United States," New York Police Commissioner James O'Neill told reporters this week. "So, I'm sure there'll still be millions of people in Times Square, no matter how cold it gets."

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