TAMPA, Fla. — To say omicron is spreading quickly would be an understatement.
“Florida has had a 991 percent increase in their cases just compared to 2 weeks ago, that’s the highest percent increase in the nation,” said Dr. Jason Salemi, an associate professor of Epidemiology at the USF College of Public Health.
While this variant is said to cause less severe illness, Dr. Salemi says because omicron is so much more transmissible, we may still see a significant amount of hospitalizations.
"If more and more people are getting infected. The sheer number of people that could end up in the hospital requiring treatment could still be very high," Dr. Salemia says.
Salemi says the hospitalization numbers for omicron aren’t nearly as bad as what we saw this summer with the delta surge, but that doesn’t mean this rise in cases won’t impact supply and demand for various COVID treatments.
“The problem is when we see cases surging like this, and more and more people coming into the hospital and looking for these treatments, now the supply of these treatments becomes a big problem," he explains.
With New Years' Eve celebrations on the horizon, Dr. Salemi says it’s still not too late to wear an N95 or KN95 mask, avoid densely populated areas, and take precautionary rapid tests to help change the course of this surge.
"If we do a lot of those things effectively, I promise you, the surge from omicron will be a lot less than it would have been otherwise,” he said.
Dr. Salemi also said hospitalization numbers tend to lag behind case count data by about 5 days. He says that means we have yet to see the potential impact these record-breaking case counts may have on our hospitals.