AdventHealth is seeing some concerning spikes in COVID-19 positivity among their Central Florida campuses as the Omicron variant pushes surges across the United States.
In a live briefing from the hospital group, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Victor Herrera said that their campuses saw a spike from under 5% positivity to 21% positivity. Herrera called it the largest such spike he had seen since the beginning of the pandemic.
While Herrera said that they have yet to identify the Omicron variant among their patients, the time and the sudden spike does indicate that the new variant is causing a surge.
“We’ve seen a rapid increase. We’ve actually never seen that number increase in the manner that we have increased in the last couple of weeks,” Herrera said.
Tom Johnson of AdventHealth TV pointed out that only around 100 people are currently hospitalized at AdventHealth campuses. That's significantly less than the 1,700 people they saw at the peak of the August spike. Herrera still urged caution, as he feared the true test will come in the next few months.
"Every surge is different," he said, before predicting that the worst of it might come at "the beginning of January" due to a two-week lag between spikes in positivity and hospitalizations.
Herrera said the hospital group is taking proactive steps to prepare for a possible surge. They restarted their COVID-19 command center, where hospital leaders can review data and come up with a plan based on speculative scenarios.
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