COVID-19 Cases Surge, But Response Now More Tepid
Perhaps it’s pandemic fatigue.
Or maybe disbelief.
Or just plain ol’ resignation.
As COVID-19 cases surge in Nebraska after winter weather’s abrupt — if seasonally appropriate — return, responses are muted in comparison to the early days of the pandemic, when treatments and vaccines were still future hopes.
Back in the early days of the pandemic, The Daily Record had daily updates about the novel coronavirus. In time, this newspaper’s decreased its focus on COVID-19, although the pandemic has been a thread that’s run through nearly every story in 2021, just as it had since March 2020, and just as it’s likely to for the remand of this new year and perhaps a while beyond.
Yet it seems worth calling our readers attention to the fact that the coronavirus is once again surging in the local community, thanks to the latest in a string of variants.
The Douglas County Health Department reported 1,038 new positive COVID-19 tests confirmed from midnight Monday through early Tuesday afternoon. Over the prior holiday weekend, more than 2,100 cases were reported over the three-day period ending Jan. 1.
Douglas County Health Director Dr. Lindsay Huse is still offering the same advice, which still remains the best advice available.
“It is best to wear a mask in public, wash your hands and stay home if you are sick,” Huse said. “Please make the choice to get vaccinated as soon as you can and keep up with booster shots.”
Statewide, the highly contagious omicron variant is driving the 8,575 new cases reported by Nebraska to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week. That’s 47% more than the 5,826 cases reported the previous week and the highest weekly total since early December 2020.
Douglas County’s tally of 4,731 last week set a new record for the pandemic, exceeding the previous peak in November 2020. The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Nebraska has more than doubled over the past two weeks from 768.71 new cases per day on Dec. 19 to 1,733.57 new cases per day on Jan. 2.
Of course, the reported cases lag the spread of the virus itself, and the statistics certainly undercount infections — if only because of asymptomatic cases that can easily go undetected. It takes time to run laboratory tests and to report back the data, as well as to distribute it, leaving everyone guessing at the true scope of COVID-19 at any given moment, as schools reopen from winter break and workers settle back into their routines.
It is clear, though, that the present moment is fraught.
“Our health system is going to be in pretty dire straits,” said Dr. James Lawler, who is a co-executive director of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security.
Nebraska hospitals continue to treat a large number of COVID-19 patients. As of Tuesday, local hospitals reported 93% occupancy of medical and surgical beds, with 103 staffed beds still available.
Adult intensive care unit beds had a 91% occupancy rate, with 26 staffed beds available. In the metro area, there were 340 people hospitalized with diagnosed COVID-19, including 105 receiving adult ICU-level care and 7 pediatric patients who were hospitalized.
The Omaha metropolitan area had 55 people ventilators for confirmed or suspected COVID-19. In addition to COVID-19, area hospitals are seeing large numbers of other patients, and flu cases are on the rise.
The omicron variant now accounts for 30% to 50% of the positive test samples that are being genetically sequenced in the state, Nebraska’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Gary Anthone said Monday.
At one of the state’s biggest labs in Omaha, the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory, omicron accounted for 77% of the latest batch of samples. Nationally, omicron accounted for 95% of new coronavirus infections in the U.S. last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.
“Within a week, a week and a half, essentially everything will be omicron,” Lawler said.
The shift in the pandemic, including the spike in case numbers without as immediate a crush on the hospital system nationally, has some experts saying that the focus should shift away from tallying up the count of confirmed infections. Instead, they point to COVID-19 hospital admissions and other indicators of the ability of the medical system to help their patients.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, for one, said last Sunday on ABC that with many infections causing few or no symptoms, “it is much more relevant to focus on the hospitalizations as opposed to the total number of cases.” Other experts argue that case counts still have value.
Public health experts believe that the vaccines remain effective at preventing serious illness, even against omicron, and that it is likely that the variant does not make most people as sick as earlier versions.
Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of ICAP, a global health center at Columbia University, said the case count does not appear to be the most important number now.
Instead, she said, the U.S. at this stage of the pandemic should be “shifting our focus, especially in an era of vaccination, to really focus on preventing illness, disability and death, and therefore counting those.”
Daily case counts and their ups and downs have been one of the most closely watched barometers during the outbreak and have been a reliable early warning sign of severe disease and death in previous coronavirus waves. But they’ve long been considered an imperfect measure because they can’t capture every infection.
Some say case numbers yield a less useful picture of the pandemic amid the spread of omicron. Case counts have lost relevance, said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine.
“Hospitalizations are where the rubber meets the road,” Noymer said. “It’s a more objective measure,” although not perfect. He added: “If I had to choose one metric, I would choose the hospitalization data.”
Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said that for each new infection detected, the U.S. is missing two cases. But he said tracking the number of positive test results is still important as omicron spreads.
Case numbers can point to future hot spots and indicate whether a wave of infection has peaked, Mokdad said. Also, case counts will continue to be important to people who are vulnerable because of age or health reasons and need a sense of the virus’ spread in their communities so they can make decisions about precautions.
“To give up on knowing if cases are going up or down, it’s flying blind. How can we as a country not know the epidemic curve for infection?” Mokdad said.
If testing has lost its relevance, he said, it is because the U.S. never developed a way to consistently and reliably monitor infections.
“It’s not acceptable to cover failure by changing the rules,” Mokdad said.
This report contains material sourced from multiple Associated Press stories.
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