Health officer hopes pandemic nears end
Monitor Edior
GREEN COVE SPRINGS— The leader of the Florida Department of Health’s Clay County office said the COVID-19 Omicron variant spreads faster than earlier versions of the virus but causes less severe symptoms.
Heather Huffman told county commissioners during their Jan. 11 meeting that new cases of the latest variant in Clay County are between 400 and 500 a day.
She added that the latest infections are not resulting in the hospitalizations and fatalities the county saw during the Delta variant surge last summer.
“Listening to the interviews with the actual cases,” she said, “it’s like having a bad cold. That’s what we’re hearing over and over again.”
Huffman said that based on her interviews with hospital administrators, the newest variant is not impacting Clay hospitals like the Delta strain did.
“We’re not seeing a huge surge like we saw with the Delta surge where you had 30 people waiting for beds in the emergency room and then the EDs were backed up,” she told commissioners. “We’re not seeing the deaths that are going along with it too.”
Huffman said the behavior of the Omicron variant is indicative of what happens at the end of a pandemic.
“We really are seeing that this will become an endemic virus,” she said, “meaning that it will become similar to the flu where it mutates year to year. “We will have to track those and look for vaccines to upgrade them each year for boosters.”
“I’m not going to say that there’s not going to be more waves of different variants,” Huffman added, “but this is typical of a virus cycle, especially during a pandemic, seeing this go into an endemic phase.”
Huffman said that of the 708 Clay County deaths attributed to COVID-19, half occurred during the Delta surge.
