COURT HOUSE – In the county’s Jan. 21 Covid report, active community cases declined by 45% over the previous week. The new cases for the week were 36% fewer than the prior week.
While there were still over 800 individuals with new positive Covid tests, the number represents a significant improvement over the last several weeks, when the omicron variant produced a stunning surge in cases.
Hospitalizations are also falling across the state. At Cape Regional Medical Center, there were 42 Covid positive patients Jan. 17. One week later, Jan. 24, that number was 26.
With 829 new cases and 1,499 active community cases, the virus is still a concern, but the trend line for the first time in weeks is encouraging.
The spectacular surge in cases through much of the last few months led to an increase in fatalities. For the week ending Jan. 21, the county reported eight new deaths related to the disease, bringing the total fatalities for January to 24, or almost one per day, on average.
Some health officials say the natural lag between infection onset and the development of serious complications means that fatalities could still increase over the next few weeks, even as case numbers decline.
Gov. Phil Murphy offered the optimistic view that the state is “on the backend of omicron,” while adding the caution that “we are not free of it.”
White House advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the disease may be moving to a more manageable form, one in which the virus is “essentially integrated into the general respiratory infections we have learned to live with.”
World Health Organization (WHO) officials warn that “it is dangerous to assume that omicron will be the last variant and that we are in the end game” of the pandemic.
Yet, the decline in the spread of omicron, often with its less serious health impacts, has led many to the optimistic view that the pandemic is ebbing and shifting to a new, more endemic stage.
The new availability of home tests through the postal service may complicate matters, since it is likely that those who test positive on such tests but either have no symptoms, or only mild ones, will never be counted as infected, skewing the metrics the nation has been relying on for information on the pandemic’s status.
Covid Act Now still lists Cape May County as severe risk for Covid infection, but the tracking system shows a greatly improved infection rate of 0.77, which is back below the 1.0 threshold.
Most health officials say that threshold marks the point at which each infected person is passing the infection to fewer than one other individual, again a sign of a declining infection rate.
More may be at stake than just the spread of new Covid cases. The Lancet medical journal reported that 57% of hospitalized patients, and 26% of non–hospitalized patients, show post-Covid symptoms months after the initial infection. This syndrome of lingering symptoms has been given the name long-Covid, and medical coding systems have now been developed to track it.
In November 2021, the Herald reported Cape Regional said that long-Covid has “an impactful presence in our community.” The health system’s physicians group reported caring for a significant number of patients with long-Covid, although the then lack of medical coding schemes for the syndrome made tracking the number of cases difficult.
Both the Brookings Institute and Barron’s have noted that long-Covid has seriously impacted the workforce. The Brookings’ study, which came out earlier this month, concluded that long-Covid may be accounting for upwards of 15% of unfilled jobs in the national workforce. Long-Covid’s lingering effects have been shown to follow even mild initial cases in those afflicted.
So far, Covid has proven to be reliably unpredictable. The numbers right now support an optimistic view of where the pandemic may be moving, but it is still too early to know anything with much certainty.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.
