“It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen, even at the peak of the prior surges of Covid,” Dr. James Phillips, who works in Washington, DC, said Wednesday, when the nation hit a new pandemic high of 300,886 average new daily cases over the prior week, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
“What we’re experiencing right now is an absolute overwhelming of the emergency departments” in Washington, Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital, told CNN’s Jim Acosta.
In Louisiana, Covid-19 hospitalizations have tripled in the past two weeks as a new record for cases was set, according to the state. Symptomatic patients have been showing up at Baton Rouge’s Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center to get tested, said the chief medical officer, Dr. Catherine O’Neal.
“We’re seeing an increase in admissions that is startling,” she told CNN on Wednesday.
Many patients O’Neal sees are unvaccinated, she said. They often have more severe illness with pneumonia and need to be intubated or need high-flow oxygen. Others who haven’t had a booster or are only partially vaccinated are suffering with a kind of flu-like illness and are “fragile,” she said.
“They’re older, they have heart failure, they have COPD, and they can’t handle Covid, even when they’re vaccinated,” O’Neal said. “Luckily, most of those people are turning around after a couple days and going home, which is a good thing.”
Hospitalizations are also peaking in Maryland, where 2,046 people were fighting Covid-19 in a hospital as of Tuesday. The state reported 10,873 new Covid-19 cases Wednesday, the highest number yet of new cases in a 24-hour period, according to state data.
“What I can tell you is that compared to people who are boosted, if you are unvaccinated, you are 10 times more likely to be a case and 20 times more likely to be a fatality,” she said at a White House Covid-19 briefing.
New Year’s celebrations should be small, experts say
With the spike in Covid-19 cases, experts are urging Americans to practice caution as they celebrate the new year. Revelers should skip big indoor New Year’s Eve parties, said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University.
The Omicron variant “is extraordinarily contagious, and if you are in a crowd now, and certainly if you’re unvaccinated, you are at great risk of contracting this virus,” Reiner told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday.
A small celebration at a friend’s house should be OK if everyone is vaccinated and boosted and tested negative before the party, he said. Big outdoor parties are less risky unless they’re crowded.
Similar advice came this week from Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said people should avoid large New Year’s Eve gatherings where they don’t know the vaccination status of guests. Small gatherings of vaccinated family or close friends are safe, he said.
“When you are talking about a New Year’s Eve party, where you have 30, 40, 50 people celebrating, you do not know the status of the vaccination — I would recommend strongly, stay away from that this year. There will be other years to do that, but not this year,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Fox News on Monday.
New CDC isolation guidance faces criticism
“We know that the most amount of transmission occurs in those one to two days before you develop symptoms (to) those two to three days after you develop symptoms,” she told CNN. “And if you map that out, those five days account for somewhere between 85% to 90% of all transmission that occurs.”
So, for those who test positive but have no symptoms or dwindling symptoms at Day 5, “we shortened the time to encourage people to do the right thing,” Walensky told CBS on Wednesday. “We don’t want them out and about when they are maximally infectious.”
The CDC is being too harshly criticized for changing the guidelines, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “Everything we’re going to do right now is imperfect. Just accept that right now,” Osterholm told CNN on Wednesday.
“We don’t know a lot of the things we wish we’d know, but what we do know and what is emerging here is that this country is going to be in the soup in just the next few weeks with so many cases and so many locations, that we’re going to see critical infrastructure as well as health care challenged,” Osterholm added.
With the rapid spread of Omicron, there may not be enough people who are well enough to keep hospitals, grocery stores and gas stations working, Osterholm predicted. The change in CDC guidelines is not just about helping the economy, he said: “It was to play to the very safety of our everyday lives.”
CNN’s Jen Christensen and Virginia Langmaid contributed to this report.
