Alabama's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Scott Harris said coronavirus cases are on the rise. Alabama is seeing the highest daily case numbers since the pandemic began 22 months ago. In the past seven days, there have been somewhere between 4,000 to 8,000 new cases daily.
On Monday, the state reported 41 deaths from the coronavirus. As of Tuesday, every county in the state was at a high level of transmission.
Four out of 10 tests are positive, but that does not include at home tests. Omicron is spreading like wildfire and there are many breakthrough cases.
"That is kind of consistent with what other people are reporting with regards to Omicron. It does cause breakthrough infections. One way to think of that in really rough terms is about half the state is vaccinated, half the state is unvaccinated and yet the unvaccinated people are 2/3 of our hospitalizations are unvaccinated patients," said Harris.
Harris said they don't yet know how many hospitalized Covid-19 patients have been boosted.
The Omicron variant is replacing the Delta variant quickly. Harris said more data will be available in the next few weeks.
ABC 33/40 asked Harris when he thinks the Coronavirus will transition from a pandemic to an endemic like the flu and what the timeline is for going back to normal.
Harris responded by saying, Covid-19 is endemic and it's here to stay. But he cautioned people from comparing Covid to the flu. He said during the last surge, Alabama hospitals were sending routine patients with broken legs and heart attacks to hospitals in other states.
"This is absolutely not the same as the flu, at the same time we may need to accept that we are dealing with it and that is exactly what we are trying to do," said Harris. "The way we deal with is, is we protect our most vulnerable people, our seniors and people with chronic health problems. We do what we can to try to limit the spread in the community by vaccinating everyone possible and then we try to make sure our health care facilities can handle the surges when they come."
There has also been a concern, not just in Alabama but across the country, regarding the lack of tests available. Harris said the state is working to address this. He said the state is trying to get additional testing sites up again like they did during the surge last summer.
ABC 33/40 also asked Harris what the timeline is to get those testing sites up and make sure testing is available when people need it.
"In terms of what we are doing, we are working on that as fast as possible. I don't know what the timeline is but we are already having meetings and phone calls with these vendors who do this and they are people we have worked with before, so we hope we can get this up and running very quickly. We do have federal money that will help to defray the cost of that," Harris responded.
Harris also said the federal government recently announced there will be 500 million over the counter tests over the next month or so. He's not clear if the state will be shipping those out but said there will be an increase in availability. He said it is still possible to get tested every day at every county health department but wanted to remind people not to go to the hospital for routine tests and to only go to the hospital for hospital care.