For a year and a half this column has tried to track the weekly course of COVID-19 in New Hampshire, but the Omicron variant is making things almost untrackable.
The latest variant, which has been found a few times in New Hampshire already, is proving far more contagious than the original SARS-CoV2 virus or the Delta variant. Some really alarming outbreaks have been reported not far from here, such as at Cornell University. That school saw cases more than triple in one week which led the huge campus, half again as big as UNH at Durham, to shut down abruptly. Worst of all, most of those cases were among fully vaccinated people, including a number who had received a booster.
One hopeful sign comes from indications that Omicron might be less dangerous to people, notably a sharp reduction in the percentage of patients who are hospitalized in South Africa, where the variant was first detected. B ut that good news is far from certain; a British study released Friday said there’s no evidence that Omicron is less severe than Delta and that the new variant can strike even if you have been previously sick with COVID-19 from an earlier variant.
The region’s hospitals are already packed, with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients filling beds and ICUs, overwhelming medical staff that are already burned out from the pandemic. A new surge of patients caused by Omicron would be a real problem.
It’s so bad that one piece of advice I’ve heard is to drive more carefully right now, because if you get hurt in an accident you have less chance of being treated quickly. I’m even being more careful when I walk up and down the stairs.
We were in a roughly similar position last year but it feels worse this time. That’s partly because it is worse in terms of absolute numbers but also because last year we were looking forward to vaccines, hoping they’d squelch the pandemic in 2021. There’s no obvious fix on the horizon this time if Omicron lives up to our worst fears – although I suppose “lives down to” would phrase it better.
This isn’t the Christmas week message the Monitor was hoping to deliver, but wishful thinking won’t keep us healthy. So the message remains: vaccine, boosters, masks and avoiding unnecessary crowds.
For coronavirus-related information and updates throughout the week, visit concordmonitor.com/coronavirus.
What’s the trend on the spread and impact of the disease? Very bad and it will probably get worse before it gets better.
As I write this, the daily count of new cases is at a record, half again as high as it ever got in last winter’s surge, and the percentage of positive results from PCR tests is in double digits.
The number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 has been hovering for a week near its record level of almost 500 people, and the number of people dying daily has gone up by 50% in the past month.
Most of this is from the Delta variant, as the Omicron variant has only just begun to show up in the state.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
