PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia health officials are reporting another sharp increase in the number of new COVID-19 cases.
New cases are now averaging about 2,000 a day.
Health department spokesperson Jim Garrow said the city doesn’t have sequencing information yet, but the evidence suggests that the omicron variant is responsible for the increase in cases.
“It’s so much more transmissible than the delta variant,” he said. “One person can infect more people, so as someone gets it, they spread it to more people, and those people spread it to more people, and at this point, it’s an exponential spread, which is what’s leading to these high numbers.”
Garrow said omicron cases are generally milder than previous variants, so the increase in hospitalizations is not as large as the increase in the number of cases. However, it has gone up — 746 people are hospitalized with the virus, compared to 422 one week ago. Nearly 70 patients are currently on ventilators.
On Wednesday, the latest data from Johns Hopkins University showed new COVID-19 cases across the U.S. had reached the highest level on record.