CDC slashes estimate of Omicron’s prevalence in the US by 50% down to 23% of all cases

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has admitted a serious error in calculating the prevalence of the Omicron variant in the US, overblowing the figure by as much as 50 percentage points, sowing confusion as the nation breaks records for new cases. 

The agency released a revised chart on Tuesday showing that the new variant accounted for 23 percent of all COVID-19 cases for the week ending on December 18, as opposed to the 73 percent it originally reported. 

The chart showed that the Omicron variant accounted for 59 percent of all new cases for the week ending on December 25, meaning the Delta variant has been accounting for far more infections than the agency initially thought, though Omicron is gaining ground quickly. 

‘There’s no way around it, it is a huge swing that makes it seem like something went really wrong,’ Dr. Shruti Gohil, the associate medical director for epidemiology and infection prevention at UC Irvine’s School of Medicine, told NPR. 

Despite the CDC’s astonishing error, data from the UK suggest that Omicron will soon account for nearly all new cases in the US. 

In England, which is several weeks ahead of the US in the Omicron wave, the new variant went from zero to 92 percent of all new cases in the four weeks leading up to December 27, according to data from the UK Health Security Agency. 

The CDC corrected its error, to the confusion of many, on the same day that the nation broke its record for the most daily COVID-19 cases with a seven-day average of 264,546 cases reported on Tuesday, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. 

The country’s previous record was about 247,503 average daily cases, reported on January 11. 

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, in a round of television interviews on Wednesday morning, said she was watching the nation’s case load and its potential impact on health care providers. 

Meanwhile, the White House COVID-19 Response Team is scheduled to hold a news conference at 11am. 

While there was some data from other countries that showed less severe illness with Omicron, it was too early to say what the impact might be across the United States, particularly given its uneven vaccination rates, Walensky told MSNBC.

‘We may have many, many more cases and so we may still very well see a lot of severe disease in the hospitals,’ Walensky said.

‘What I am focused on now is making sure that we can get through this Omicron surge, that we do so with minimal amount of hospitalization and severe disease,’ she added, pointing to vaccines and booster shots as top tools to curb infections.

‘We are seeing and expecting even more cases of this Omicron variant,’ even if many are mild, she said separately on CNN.

States showing the highest daily infection numbers on Tuesday included New York, which reported as many as 40,780 cases, and California, which reported over 30,000. Texas reported more than 17,000 cases and Ohio over 15,000. 

Global COVID-19 infections hit a record high over the past seven-day period, according to new data Wednesday. 

Almost 900,000 cases were detected on average each day around the world between December 22 and 28, with myriad countries posting new all-time highs over the past 24 hours, including the United States, Australia and many European nations. 

The simultaneous circulation of the Delta and Omicron variants of the coronavirus is creating a ‘tsunami of cases’, World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

‘Delta and Omicrom are now twin threats driving up cases to record numbers, leading to spikes in hospitalisation and deaths,’ said Tedros.

‘I am highly concerned that Omicron, being highly transmissible and spreading at the same time as Delta, is leading to a tsunami of cases.’

Tedros repeated his call for countries to share vaccines more equitably and warned that the emphasis on boosters in richer countries could leave poorer nations short of jabs.

He said the WHO was campaigning for every country to hit a target of 70% vaccine coverage by the middle of 2022, which would help end the acute phase of the pandemic.

New Year’s Eve will mark the second anniversary of China alerting the WHO to 27 cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan.

More than 281 million people have since been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and more than 5 million have died.

The CDC’s new data on the prevalence of the Omicron variant shows that the Delta variant, which appears more severe but less contagious than Omicron, still has a hold on the country and is one driving factor behind the most current surge in cases.

It also raises the question of how the CDC could have recorded such a drastic difference in the strain’s prevalence than what was the reality. 

Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the CDC, recognized the ‘wide predictive interval posted in last week’s chart,’ referring to the huge gap in the data for the week ending on December 18, and attributed it to the ‘speed at which Omicron was increasing.’

‘CDC’s models have a range, and… we’re still seeing steady increase in the proportion of Omicron,’ she told Fox News.

Gohil noted that there is ‘always a delay in the testing information that comes in, and that’s what the public should take away.’

She added that health professionals were finally understanding the Delta variant more and figuring out how to test for it efficiently when the Omicron variant swept through the country.

‘The way in which we test and the way in which we have certitude about the numbers was all in flux right at that moment. Then along comes this new variant and now here you are trying to project something when you don’t have all of the mechanisms in place,’ Gohil said. 

The scant rate of testing in the US may be contributing to uncertainty in the data. The UK is performing 22.3 COVID tests per 1,000 people every day, five times more than the US rate of 4.5, according to figures from Our World in Data. 

Moreover, only a tiny fraction of the positive tests are actually sequenced to determine the variant strain, leaving huge potential gaps in the surveillance effort. 

Dr. Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general for the Trump Administration, also pointed to testing as a reason for the false Omicron numbers. He referred to something called the ‘S gene dropout,’ in which one of the three target genes is not detected – a signifier of the Omicron variant.

‘A lot of people were seeing this S dropout on the tests even before they got the follow-up genetic testing, and so those samples were disproportionately more likely to be sent in for sequencing,’ he told Fox News.

‘It’s also important for people to understand that in the grand scheme of things, they really were probably just a week or two ahead of what we’re going to see anyway, because omicron is spreading so quickly that it is going to be 73 percent by the time you look at this week’s or next week’s numbers,’ Dr. Adams told the news outlet.

While the CDC reported that the Delta variant accounted for 41 percent of cases in the week ending on December 25, that number could be as high as 58 percent given the agency’s margin of error, NPR reported.

Regardless, Gohil said, ‘The implication is that we have a lot of delta going on and that requires a lot more attention. People are thinking, ‘Oh, well, omicron’s not that bad.’ But it’s actually still too early to really know even that. Besides, Delta is the beast that you should be worried about.’

The CDC’s latest data will also put a burden on hospitals that will have to adjust their treatment methods to account for the vast different in Omicron and Delta cases, as different strains require different antibodies and medications.

‘The bottom line is, don’t take your masks off just yet and get vaccinated, vaccinated, vaccinated, vaccinated — and boosted,’ Gohil told NPR. 

COVID-19 cases in the U.S. also doubled over the past two weeks. Over the past week, 235,269 Americans have been testing positive for the virus every day – a 98 percent increase from two weeks ago and approaching the prior record of 247,503 set last January, according to a DailyMail.com analysis of Johns Hopkins data.

Though Omicron is thought to be less severe than Delta, hospitalizations have also been rising, up 6 percent nationwide over the past two weeks, to 71,381.

In a troubling warning sign, the UK, where Omicron struck earlier, has seen hospitalizations rise nearly 50 percent in the past week, with 1,374 coronavirus-infected patients admitted on Sunday, an 11-month high.

Hospitalizations are soaring in some US states, including Louisiana, New Jersey and Florida where in each case the number of patients has jumped nearly 60 percent in two weeks. As well, Michigan, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire all hit record hospitalizations earlier this month.

‘January is going to be a really, really hard month. And people should just brace themselves for a month where lots of people are going to get infected,’ Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told CNN.

Jha warned that the unvaccinated would bear the brunt of severe illness, while most who are vaccinated and boosted were unlikely to face hospitalization.

‘A lot of people who have not gotten a vaccine are going to end up getting pretty sick, and it’s going to be pretty disruptive,’ Jha said.

‘My hope is as we get into February and certainly by the time we get into March, infection numbers will come way down, and it’ll also start getting (into) spring, and the weather will start getting better. And that will also help.’  

Another move that turned heads on Monday was the CDC’s decision to cut the amount of time asymptomatic COVID-19 patients need to quarantine in half, from 10 days to five days.   

‘The reason is that with the sheer volume of new cases that we are having and that we expect to continue with Omicron, one of the things we want to be careful of is that we don’t have so many people out,’ Fauci said in a Tuesday interview with CNN, explaining the decision. 

‘Obviously if you have symptoms, you should not be out. But if you are asymptomatic and you are infected, we want to get people back to the jobs. Particularly those with essential jobs, to keep our society running smoothly. So I think that was a very prudent and good choice on the part of the CDC.’

But not all health experts were on board with the new decision. In a separate interview with Good Morning America, Jha criticized the CDC’s new rule.  

‘I actually think It would help a lot if we asked people to get a negative test as well,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why the CDC did not put that in, I suspect it might be because tests are still hard to come by.’

Although studies have suggested the Omicron variant is less deadly than some of its predecessors, the huge numbers of people testing positive mean that hospitals in some countries might soon be overwhelmed, while businesses might struggle to carry on operating because of workers having to quarantine.

France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Malta all registered a record number of new cases on Tuesday, while the average number of daily COVID-19 cases in the United States hit a record daily case tally on Wednesday. 

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday that 90% of patients ending up in intensive care had not received booster vaccines, which medics say is the best protection against the infectious Omicron.

‘The Omicron variant continues to cause real problems, you’re seeing cases rising in hospitals, but it is obviously milder than the Delta variant,’ Johnson said.

New daily infections in Australia spiked to nearly 18,300 on Wednesday, eclipsing the previous pandemic high of around 11,300 hit a day earlier.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said his country needed ‘a gear change’ to manage overburdened laboratories, with long walk-in and drive-in queues reported in a number of areas.

Testing bottlenecks have also built in European nations, including Spain where demand for free COVID-19 testing kits provided by Madrid’s regional government far outstripped, with long queues forming outside pharmacies.

A number of governments were also increasingly worried by the huge numbers of people being forced into self-isolation because they had been in contact with a coronavirus sufferer.

‘We just can’t have everybody just being taken out of circulation because they just happen to be at a particular place at a particular time,’ Australia’s Morrison told reporters.

Italy was expected to relax some of its quarantine rules on Wednesday over fears the country will soon grind to a halt given how many people are having to self-isolate protectively, with cases doubling on Tuesday from a day earlier to 78,313.

However, China showed no let up in its policy of zero tolerance to outbreaks, keeping 13 million people in the city of Xian under rigid lockdown for a seventh day as new COVID-19 infections persisted, with 151 cases reported on Tuesday.

‘I just want to go home,’ said a 32-year-old mechanic, who was in Xian last week for a business trip when the city was effectively shut off from the outside world.

No cases of Omicron have been announced in Xian so far.

Many countries are still grappling with the earlier Delta variant, including Poland, which reported 794 COVID-related deaths on Wednesday – the highest number in the fourth wave of the pandemic.

Deputy Health Minister Waldemar Kraska said more than 75% of those who died were unvaccinated.

Early data from Britain, South Africa and Denmark suggests there is a reduced risk of hospitalization for the Omicron compared with the Delta variant, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in its latest epidemiological report.

However, the report said further data was needed to understand how severity of illness may be impacted by vaccination and, or, prior infection.

The surge in cases is coinciding with the New Year holidays, normally a period of parties and travel. Some countries, such as Italy, have cancelled public celebrations, while authorities in Japan urged residents to keep end-of-year gatherings small.

‘The highest risk is meeting people without taking adequate measures to prevent infection,’ said Norio Ohmagari, director of the Disease Control and Prevention Center and a top health advisor to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.