Except in Schools, Omicron Wave Crests in Flagler and Florida as Officials See End to Emergency

That’s been said before, of course, especially after vaccines began rolling out. Then delta obliterated premature hopes of the pandemic’s end in 2021. But several factors are converging in an indication that this time the crisis stage may well be on the wane, to be replaced by more routine infectious-disease management strategies.

Flagler County confirmed 1,298 cases in the week ending Friday, a 12 percent decrease from the previous week, though hospitalizations at AdventHealth Palm Coast on a primary diagnosis of Covid were up to 48 on Friday, the highest total since the summer wave. Eight patients were in intensive care, five were on ventilators. (An internal communication at AdventHealth indicated last week that 31 percent of ICU patients were fully vaccinated in ICUs across Avent’s Central Florida network.)

Flagler Health Department testing was still drawing between 175 to 200 people a day at its covid-testing site at the Flagler County airport between 8 a.m. and noon each day.




In Flagler County schools, the district confirmed 39 student-positive infections on Friday and three infections among staff, up from 27 and one the previous week, and 16 and 6 the week before that, suggesting that the wave hasn’t yet crested in schools. In total, the district saw 183 new infections last week, 12 of them among staff, compared with 120 the week before (17 of them among staff) and 45 the week before that. The numbers in schools are repeating a pattern seen during delta, when community spread first began in the community at large then became more pronounced in schools before numbers eased. School numbers, in other words, should begin to decline soon and rapidly.

Florida confirmed 298,200 cases, a 33 percent decline from the previous week’s total of 430,300. Deaths from covid continue to rise, with Florida’s death tally rising by 605 in a single week, for a total of 63,763 deaths from covid–three and a half times the population of Flagler County. At some point this week, the country will register its 900,000th death from covid, by far more than in any other country in the world. Brazil is next, with 623,000 deaths.

Flagler has lost 285 residents to Covid, though the current surge has been significantly less deadly than the delta surge last summer.

“Three times as many cases and one eighth the number of deaths,” is how Dr. Stephen Bickel, the medical director at the Flagler County Health Department, described it in on the radio Friday. There is a lot of speculation, he said, about Omicron being a milder variant, but it is also indisputable that the country is near herd immunity: between vaccinations, boosters and previous infections, along with better treatment options, the population has built up more resistance to the virus’ deadlier effects.




Today, the World Health Organization offered a similar analysis when its director for the European region, Dr. Hans Kluge, said omicron “offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization.” Omicron is quickly displacing delta, and in the United States and Florida, it has made delta almost irrelevant.

“The pandemic is far from over, but I am hopeful we can end the emergency phase in 2022,” Kluge said, according to press reports, with the unvaccinated still at the highest risk of infection and death. That means lthe pandemic will yield to a more endemic phase, with different strategies in play.

“It’s getting harder and harder to argue that our policies should be different than how we deal with the flu,” Bickel said. “what I expect is, our numbers are going to come down pretty dramatically like they went up. A month ago, we were at 172 cases, five weeks ago. And I think five weeks from now we could be at that same number. Deaths are going to go up a little bit with a lag. That’s what happened with hospitalizations. The hospitalization number is 44 now for Advent, was 101 at the peak with Delta. They’re still on green status, they’re having fewer people in the hospital go to the ICU, fewer people in the ICU on ventilators. So all those things are good, and that translates to fewer deaths. So everything looks pretty good.”

The delta wave was defined by the unvaccinated: they bore the brunt of hospitalizations and death. The omicron wave is a bit different: it’s defined by those at risk.

“The main the main thing I want to tell people is if you’re one of these high-risk people it’s a little different of a ballgame,” Bickel said. “If you’re not, you probably have your own attitude about how you want to deal with things.”




The Centers for Disease Control defines people at risk as those with conditions that have weakened their immune systems, including cancer, chronic kidney, liver, heart and lung disease, diabetes (type 1 or 2), neurological conditions including dementia, obesity, HIV infection and substance use disorders, among others. (The full list is here.) The unvaccinated or un-boosted continue to be at greater risk of more severe sickness or death.

In Flagler, 62 percent of all residents have been fully vaccinated, including 87 percent of those 65 and older and 70 percent of those 18 and older. In Florida, 64.8 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, compared with 63.6 percent in the nation as a whole. But “Florida is below the national average and well behind other states when it comes to COVID booster shots that can help ward off Covid,” the Florida Phoenix reports. Only 35.6 percent of Floridians have been boosted, the data shows, placing Florida 38th out of 50 states in that category.