NEW YORK, Jan 10 (NNN-AGENCIES) – As the highly infectious Omicron variant takes command amid the lingering pandemic, the most significant infection surge of COVID-19 to date is emerging in the United States, putting additional pressure on an overtaxed health care system.
“We have seen an incredible proliferation of the virus in hospitals, such that, we went from a place where virtually no county in the country was at risk of exceeding its capacity, to well over half are now,” Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, was quoted by ABC News as saying.
Although preliminary global studies indicate that the Omicron variant may cause less severe illness than prior variants, health officials said that, the sheer numbers of infections caused by the new variant could still overwhelm the health care system.
“The burden on the health care system is made worse by nationwide staffing shortages and hospital capacity at elevated levels, as many other patients seek care for non-virus related reasons,” said the ABC News report.
“Due to the tsunami of Omicron cases, the volume is affecting our health and community service,” Rebecca Weintraub, assistant professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, was quoted as saying. “While we are very lucky hospitalisations have decoupled, the vast spread is alarming.”
Late last month, Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, pointed to the disparity between cases and hospitalisation, as a “strong” indicator that Omicron is less severe, as the U.S. has not experienced a concomitant increase in the relative percentage of hospitalisations.
“Even if you have less of a percentage of severity, when you have multi-multi-multi-fold more people getting infected, the net amount is, you’re still going to get a lot of people that are going to be needing hospitalisation. And that’s the reason why we’re concerned about stressing and straining the hospital system,” Fauci told ABC News earlier this month.
The Omicron variant made around 95.4 percent of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. for the week ending Jan 1, the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said on Jan 4.– NNN-AGENCIES
