There’s good news and bad news:
Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, warned on Sunday that the Omicron surge of coronavirus cases had not yet peaked nationally, saying that the next few weeks would be very difficult in many parts of the country as hospitalizations and deaths rise.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Dr. Murthy noted the “good news” of the plateaus and drops in known cases in the Northeast, especially in New York City and New Jersey.
But “the challenge is that the entire country is not moving at the same pace,” he said, adding “we shouldn’t expect a national peak in the coming days.”
“The next few weeks will be tough,” he said.
The highly contagious Omicron variant has fueled an explosive surge of known cases, with an average of more than 800,000 new cases a day reported on Saturday, according to a New York Times database.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, also expressed concerns that the next several weeks would overwhelm hospitals and staff. “Right now we’re at about 150,000 people in the hospital with Covid,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s more than we’ve ever had. I expect those numbers to get substantially higher.”
In Kansas City, Mo., Omicron has overwhelmed hospitals since the holiday season, the city’s mayor, Quentin Lucas, said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“We have seen incredible challenges in our health care network, even getting employees that are working in our EMS services, fire department and in public safety,” Mr. Lucas said. “It is a substantial concern.”
How cases, hospitalizations and deaths are trending in the U.S.
This chart shows how three key metrics compare to the corresponding peak per capita level reached nationwide last winter.
In addition, Omicron has brought into sharp relief the longstanding lack of adequate testing supplies, with consumers now depleting pharmacies of costly rapid tests — a boxed set of two tests ranges from $14 to $24 — and creating long lines at testing sites.
The federal government has promised to distribute one billion rapid at-home coronavirus tests to Americans, limiting each household to request four free tests. And new federal rules require private insurers to cover up to eight at-home tests per member a month.
We’re not out of the woods yet. If the refusniks would just get vaccinated, we’d be out of it a whole lot sooner. But this is us — exceptional America.