Hospital officials in Northeast Florida are urging people to get vaccinated as the number of COVID-19 patients is approaching or exceeding levels they saw during the worst of the pandemic.
UF Health Jacksonville, in Florida's most populous city, has seen an"exponential" rise in the number of COVID-19 patients admitted in recent weeks, Chad Neilsen, director of infection prevention at the hospital, told ABC News.
"We knew it was most likely due to the delta variant taking a bigger footprint here in the Northeast Florida region because it was so rapid of an increase," Nielsen said."Everybody in town is suffering the same fate we are."UF Health North Campus medical complex, Feb. 12, 2015, in Jacksonville, Fla. There are other similarities among the area's hospitals -- the COVID-19 patients they are admitting are largely unvaccinated, and they are younger than what they've previously seen during the pandemic.
"Our median age of our hospitalized patients is 49 -- it was in the mid-60s in prior waves of this pandemic," VanOsdol said during Wednesday's press briefing."So it's a younger demographic who are not getting vaccinated that unfortunately are contracting COVID, and these cases are requiring hospitalization for treatment."
As of Monday, the seven-day average of new cases went up 107.48% in Duval County, where Jacksonville sits,CDC"Vaccines are stagnant here in Northeast Florida, and the delta variant is just running rampant amongst the unvaccinated folks," Neilsen said.Neilson attributes the latest surge in part to delta's rise coinciding with Fourth of July gatherings, but said it's hard to predict where hospitalizations might be heading"because it spreads so quickly.
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