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CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – The Medical University of South Carolina says that new data shows the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has peaked in the Charleston Tri-County area.
Officials with MUSC say Omicron hit a pandemic high of 416 cases per day per 100,000 people on Jan. 15. and the numbers have fallen since then.
Over the last seven days, officials say they’ve seen it drop another 22% to 230 cases per day per 100,000 people.
“I just can’t stress enough how high the rate still is, though,” MUSC Team Leader Michael Sweat, Ph.D., said. “I mean, that’s a big number of people getting infected every day. I worry people are going to see the statement that things are declining rapidly and not be careful at this period where there’s are a lot of cases occurring.”
Health experts say they are also still concerned over the number of COVID patients hospitalized.
MUSC is reporting the number of COVID patients in their MUSC Health’s Charleston hospitals is now 178, up from 174 on Jan. 25 and 161 on Jan. 24.
“It’s a large proportion of the overall number of people in the hospital,” Sweat said. “Every one of those people, for some period of time, has to be isolated, and it takes a lot of effort and time to treat somebody in isolation. So it’s a really big burden on the hospital.”
Sweat says the increase was expected after the surge because hospitalizations usually run a few weeks behind infections.
He expects hospitalizations to ease in the near future but is still worried about what else might be out there.
“A bigger worry to me is will another variant pop out of some weird space like Omicron did,” Sweat said. “Omicron did not come out of the lineage of Delta. It originated from the original Wuhan virus, they think, based on all of the genetics they’ve done.”
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