COVID cases spike 55% in New York, doctors fear ‘frightening’ new variants
The latest, released Aug. 2, shows that COVID cases spiked by 55% since the prior week, with an average of 824 reported cases per day across the state. And hospital admissions for the disease increased by 22% compared to the previous week, which translates to more than 100 admissions a day.
Meanwhile, a new variant — dubbed EG.5, or eris — has arisen as the dominant strain, causing about 17% of COVID cases nationwide,However, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the NYC health commissioner,“the good news is that we’re not seeing anything in the virus that suggests it’s getting more transmissible or more lethal. What this really is, is just waning immunity … This is part of living with COVID and these fluctuations are to be expected.”Despite the availability of vaccines and boosters, COVID-19 cases are rising nationwide this summer.The rise in COVID-19 cases isn’t limited to New York: The CDC recorded 8,000 US hospital admissions for COVID-19 in the week ending July 22, a 12% increase from the week before. CDC data also shows that each year since the pandemic began in 2020, an annual winter spike in cases — such as when the omicron variant caused a leap in infections in the winter of 2021-22 — is followed by a smaller increase in the middle of the summer. “The most frightening thing to me is, we don’t know where that [omicron] variant came from,” Bershteyn said, adding that an even deadlier variant could arise without warning.As new variants continue to appear, health experts are“The most frightening thing is if the virus was more deadly,” Anna Bershteyn, assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU’s medical school, told The Post. “That’s really scary,” Bershteyn added, “if a virus had the transmissibility of COVID and was as deadly as the MERS coronavirus,” referring toEven as cases increase and people gather for summer travel, popular movies and other events, tests for COVID-19 aren’t as readily available as they once were.COVID-19 pandemic killed more than 80K in NY, almost 1.13M across US, CDC tally shows In June, the Biden administration stopped mailing out free test kits, and the ones people stockpiled over the past year or two are either expired or will be soon.Because of the availability of the antiviral Paxlovid, “we actually have no supply problems” when it comes to treating cases of COVID-19, Bershteyn added. “Testing is really the key way to take advantage of these medications.” And even though the number of COVID-19 deaths has dropped, “1 out of every 100 deaths is still something,” Bershteyn noted, referring to the CDC’s estimate that 1% of US deaths are due to the disease. Moreover, many health insurance plans stopped paying for over-the-counter test kits once the requirement to do so ended when the emergency declaration was lifted. The lack of available test kits could add to a rise in COVID hospitalizations and deaths, say health experts. “We are going to continue to see people hospitalized for COVID … that could have been prevented had testing been freely and widely available,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee,Testing sites, like this one in New York City, are harder to find today than during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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