NY COVID Cases Shatter All-Time Record for 2nd Straight Day With 74K Positives; Omicron Taxes Hospitals

New York smashed its single-day COVID case record for the second straight day Thursday, reporting at least 74,000 new positives as the omicron surge stretches hospitals further, the state health commissioner said in a TV interview.

Statewide hospitalizations are already at mid-February levels and “are going up,” Dr. Mary Bassett told CNN ahead of the governor’s official data release for the day. The admission total wasn’t immediately clear as of early Thursday afternoon. A day ago, it stood at 6,767, a 10% increase in 24 hours and perilously close to the 2021 highs around 8,700 from January. More than 960 patients were in ICUs at that point.

When asked if the state was going to have to rely on National Guard assistance to cover staff shortages through an omicron surge that isn’t expected to peak for another month at least, Bassett told CNN the state is tracking the data and in close communication with those troops. At the moment, hospital bed capacity is stable.

“Let’s keep focused on getting people vaccinated, let’s remember to wear masks, avoid crowds when we can, be careful during the upcoming holiday season about how we plan our time and plan for the most vulnerable person in our group, and make sure that these gatherings remain safe for them,” Basset, who endured a breakthrough COVID infection herself earlier this month, said.

The health commissioner says she expects recently adopted state guidance on return-to-work for essential personnel who are fully vaccinated and asymptomatic or have had their symptoms resolve without medication will help fill the gaps.

Kids under age 5 are still not eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine — and now hospitals are seeing a spike in children infected with the Omicron variant of the virus. In New York City, pediatric hospitalizations have quadrupled. And data shows huge percentages of child COVID patients have not been fully vaccinated yet, either due to choice or because they’re ineligible, says Dr. Colleen Kraft of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

“We know vaccinated individuals shed less virus than people who are unvaccinated. There are a whole host of reasons to get vaccinated but probably the most important is people who are vaccinated are less sick,” Bassett said.

She added that also applies to children, who are experiencing alarming increases of COVID hospitalization, especially in New York City. Bassett said earlier this week that none of the kids in the 5-to-11-year-old age group who are currently hospitalized in New York with the virus had been vaccinated, and just about a quarter of kids aged 12 to 17 currently hospitalized had been inoculated.

“That youngest age group, 5- to 11-year-olds who’ve been eligible for vaccination for about a month now, we still are seeing too few children vaccinated, something like 30% have gotten their first jab,” Bassett said. “That’s a number that we really need to see go up, we want people to protect their children.”

Statewide, just 17.3% of kids in that youngest-eligible group have completed their vaccine series, the latest data shows. Almost a third (64.4%) of children aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated. That compares with respective rates of 16.5% and 71% for those age groups in New York City, which has seen its child COVID hospitalizations quintuple over the last three weeks while state pediatric hospitalizations doubled.

The data are almost hard to fathom — nearly 20% of all COVID tests in the state came back positive Wednesday, and in just the last seven days, about 1.5% of all New York residents have tested positive.

The omicron variant, the first local case of which was reported Dec. 2, accounted for 74.2% of genetically sequenced positive New York COVID samples uploaded to GISAID, the world’s largest repository of COVID-19 sequences, over the last two weeks. That’s up from 73.3% a day ago, 11.1% in the two-week period ending Dec. 18 and from 2.2% in the two-week period before that, state data shows.

CDC data for the latest two weeks says omicron could account for anywhere from 70% to 97% of current infections in the New York area for the week ending Dec. 25. Nationally, the prevalence is estimated to be as high as 74%, the agency says.

Ultimately, officials say vaccinations will quell the increases in hospitalizations and deaths associated with the omicron wave — and those metrics are a much greater concern for them than infections alone. That’s why they’re urging calm at this time — and pushing vaccinations and COVID boosters for those who have to get them.