Where Omicron Hit First in the U.S., cases are starting to drop

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Fri, 2022-01-14 15:34 — mike kraft

At another bleak moment of the pandemic in the United States — with nearly 800,000 new cases a day, deaths rising and federal medical teams deploying to overwhelmed hospitals — glints of progress have finally started to emerge. In a handful of places that were among the first to see a surge of the Omicron variant last month, reports of new coronavirus infections have started to level off or decline.

Daily case reports have been falling rapidly around Cleveland, Newark and Washington, D.C., each of which sustained record-shattering spikes over the past month. There were also early signs in Chicago, New York, Puerto Rico and hard-hit ski resort towns in Colorado that cases were hitting a plateau or starting to drop.

The slowing of the spread in those places was welcome news, raising the prospect that a national peak in the Omicron wave may be approaching. But most of the country continued to see explosive growth in virus cases, with some Western and Southern states reporting 400 percent increases over the past two weeks. Officials also warned that hospitalizations and deaths lag actual infections, meaning that even in places where new cases have begun declining, it would still be weeks before the full impact of Omicron was known.

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“We’re very far from being out of the woods,” said Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, the director of the Ohio Department of Health, who told reporters that he was encouraged by early indications of a downturn in parts of his state. But he warned: “If we’ve learned one thing about Covid it’s that it is extraordinarily unpredictable. And things can change dramatically and quickly.”

In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers said on Thursday that National Guard members would train as nursing assistants and then deploy to short-staffed nursing homes. In Omaha, where the Nebraska attorney general sued the county health director over a new mask mandate, a major hospital said it was activating a crisis plan that would limit appointments and reschedule surgeries because of surging caseloads. And at a small hospital in Canton, S.D., officials said, four of the eight nurses who would usually be treating patients on the floor were out with the virus at one point last week.

“What we’re bracing for right now is really doing everything we can to avoid a work force shortage,” said Dr. Jeremy Cauwels, the chief physician for Sanford Health, in the Upper Midwest, where more than 400 employees across the hospital system were off work with the virus this week.

Christina Ramirez, a biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles, said it was too early to tell where the United States was in its surge. Omicron passed through and peaked in South Africa in about a month, but countries like Denmark and Germany look more like a “jagged sawtooth,” she said. “You get a couple days where it goes down, goes back up and goes back down.”

“We’ve been fooled by the virus before,” Dr. Ramirez said. “The next couple of weeks will be very telling.”

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