Overall, the outlook for Covid is better than it was before. On Saturday, some 400,000 tests were done in New York City, with a positive rate of 12.9 per cent. It was just a week ago that on the same number of tests, the positive rate was almost 20%.
Saturday, the state reported 51,264 new cases. That’s down from a week ago, when there were more than 90,000. Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, said that even though Omicron had spread quickly, it had not yet reached its peak in the US as a whole. The seven-day rolling average of new infections was still around 800,000 cases a day, as it had been for the last two days. People in many parts of the country will keep getting infections, and the “next few weeks will be tough.”
Murthy said on CNN’s State of the Union that the country isn’t moving at the same speed.
It took a little longer for the Omicron wave to spread to other parts of the country, but it did. During the next few days, we shouldn’t expect to see a national high point. It’s been said that the Biden administration didn’t think about how many people would want to be tested after a national vaccine and re-vaccination or booster drive seemed to be faltering.
With very little information about Omicron, the agency has tried to move faster with its recommendations. For example, it has tried to cut isolation periods and no longer require a negative test result to leave isolation. “We felt the need to take action before we had Omicron-specific data,” said the CDC director. It said last week that the White House bought $1 billion worth of tests to give away for free. A half-billion would be available to order on January 19 and sent to by mail, with up to four free tests per home address.
