NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — The omicron variant is the holiday visitor no one invited – but the head of New York State’s largest healthcare organization believes “it’s not as bad as people think.”
Northwell Health President and CEO Michael Dowling tells WCBS 880 in this week’s In Depth Podcast that once the holidays pass, things may start to improve quickly.
“If we can get through January – which we will – I think we will be in relatively better shape,” Dowling said.
Currently, the statewide positivity rate is around 11.96% and New York continues to set records with thousands of new cases recorded every day.
Meanwhile, the omicron surge has created an incredible demand for testing in communities across the New York region.
But Northwell’s Dowling said the new variant is producing milder COVID cases.
Earlier this week, the number of hospitalizations in Northwell facilities was said to be just over 400. That compares to over 900 during this time last year, and 3,000 at the heigh of the pandemic in 2020.
Still, in the wide-ranging conversation, Dowling admitted that the surge in cases has pushed him to consider a booster mandate for all Northwell Health employees, and said he will make the decision in the coming weeks.
“I’m allowing a little bit of time for people to do this voluntarily for the right reasons but if I have to do a mandate I will do a mandate,” he said.
In this week’s episode, we also dig into the science of the COVID detectives.
Our Peter Haskell spent time at the Long Island City’s Pandemic Response Lab (PRL), which is one of the many labs that processes the thousands of COVID-19 diagnostic tests in the state.
The Queens’ PRL lab is the first place where the omicron variant was discovered in New York. Ever since, the cases of the variant have been on the rise.
Last week, omicron represented 10% of the positive cases the lab was seeing.
Haskell spoke with PRL’s director of research and development, John Laurent, who said that number jumped to over 50% in just a matter of days.
Laurent added that the lab was sequencing just a few thousand tests per week a few weeks back and he expects to process “somewhere north of 5,000 tests” this week, as they help deal with the omicron surge.
Sequencing is the process of looking at positive cases and digging into the samples to “read out the genome sequence” to assign a variant or even discover new ones.
Laurent called it “a constant battle,” but vowed to continue fighting COVID-19 with the hope that it doesn’t stay around forever.
Related
Related
