Health officials say COVID-19 hospitalizations have doubled after the holiday season and also due to the new omicron sub-variants in the county.
Just before New Year's Eve, we published recent data that reported over 400 patients were hospitalized with illnesses linked to COVID-19, and now health experts fear that these numbers won't be slowing down any time soon.
And now this week, San Diego County officials have reported 15 new deaths linked to the pandemic, as the county is currently placed in the "medium" status of COVID-19.
The omicron sub-variant, BQ.1.1, is now considered the predominant type of virus since October.
And though this form of virus has been shown to affect mostly the northeast part of the country, wastewater sampling showed it was present in San Diego during November.
Local health experts say that this sub-variant appears to be immune evasive, which could eventually result in more hospitalizations in the foreseeable future.
“It seems to be more immune evasive and so we may also see more hospitalizations, more illness,” said Corinne McDaniels-Davidson, epidemiologist and the director of the SDSU Institute for Public Health.
The biggest concern is the amount of gatherings that have been taking place from Christmas Eve going forward, which in many cases is spread by asymptomatic individuals who attend parties without knowing they are infected additional people.
“I think we have two weeks, maybe three weeks of pain still coming – COVID cases and flu cases,” said Dr. Davey Smith, head of infectious diseases at University of California San Diego. “We're only a few days past Christmas, so it's really hard to tell.”
“A lot of young people will have this infection, asymptomatically, and then they'll bring it to these holiday parties and it's a disaster,” Dr. Smith added. “I just see too many families grieving over their relatives and realizing that they had a part to play in that travesty. And that's just heartbreaking.”
