Omicron 'Leveling Off' In Washington, Hospitals Still Stressed

OLYMPIA, WA — Improvement has been slow-going, but it's ready to kick into high gear. Epidemiologists with the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) have been forecasting a plateau or leveling-off of new COVID-19 cases for weeks, and it appears that plateau has finally arrived.

"The trajectory of these cases and our trends appears to be on the downturn," said Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah at the DOH's weekly briefing Wednesday. "The numbers have started to level off from what we were seeing in the holidays and the early part of January."

In late December and early January, the arrival of the more-transmissible omicron coronavirus variant drove a record-breaking surge in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, one which put immense stress and strain on Washington's health care system.

"What you're seeing here is a downward turn in our number of cases," said State Epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist. "We are hearing from a lot of our folks in the field that are doing most of the testing that they are clearly seeing this."

But while case counts are on the decline, hospitalizations are still lagging behind.

"We are still at an incredibly high number when it comes to hospitalizations," Shah said.

According to the DOH, new hospitalizations are leveling off, particularly in Western Washington, but it may be a week or more before the state sees a marked improvement.

"We're not seeing this downward trend yet in hospitalizations, but this is what looks to be a stalling out of our hospitalizations. This is also very good news," Lindquist said.

While the state waits for further improvement, Washingtonians are urged to avoid hospitals in all but the most serious circumstances for the time being.

"Especially if you have no symptoms or mild symptoms, or you feel that you've been exposed, but you're just not sure, that's not the place to go to be checked out," Shah said. "We'd rather that you contact your primary healthcare provider."

One way to prevent healthy Washingtonians from crowding ICUs, is by making rapid testing more readily available. Health leaders say they've also had success on that front, distributing 2.1 million COVID-19 tests to 460,000 households across Washington through the Amazon-powered distribution system. That number does not include thousands more delivered by the federal COVIDTests.gov website.

Finally, while the overall situation has improved and appears to be on the path towards a more-permanent recovery, doctors stress that this is still no time to throw caution to the wind.

"To everyone who is saying 'hey look, it's great, it's getting better, it's not a big issue', we are having between 50 and 70 deaths per day," Lindquist said. "This is still a very significant pandemic."