Alabama’s COVID-19 caseload is on the rise and heath care providers are blaming the Thanksgiving holiday. The State was dealing with up to three hundred daily cases of the coronavirus before last month’s holiday. Now, it’s closer to six hundred cases a day. Alabama is also bracing for the arrival of the new Omicron* strain of the Coronavirus. Doctor Suzanne Judd teaches public heath at UAB. She says the state should be on guard even though cases of the new strain aren’t showing up in the data…
“Is it here yet? Likely. Yes,” asserted Judd. “We don't do as much genotyping in Alabama as other states. So it may take us a while to find omicron. But what we saw in South Africa was that they went from very few cases nearly down to zero. It only 300 cases a day to nearly 15,000 and four weeks. So a huge jump.”
The Omicron strain first started making headlines when cases appeared in South Africa. Healthcare researchers there noted that the new variant showed signs of being more communicable than previous types of COVID-19. However, those cases resulted in fewer hospitalizations. Doctor Judd echoed those observations in her comments.
“We think it's possible it may be less virulent, which just means less severe, so less likely to put people in the hospital, but still spreading quite rapidly,” said Judd. “There are many reasons for this, and we don't know for sure if that's true, but early indications are that it may not be quite as bad as previous versions.”
Alabama still lags behind in the south for vaccinations at forty four percent. States like Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts have around seventy percent of their populations inoculated for the virus.
