Omicron infects over 1,675 people during Christmas weekend in Hamilton
CBC
Over 1,675 people got infected with COVID-19 from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, according to data from Hamilton Public Health Services.
The local public health unit reported 1,675 new confirmed or probable cases detected by contact tracers on the final weekend of 2021.
Public health officials say the actual number of infections in Hamilton is much higher because not everyone is getting a PCR test or reporting their case to public health. There is also a delay in testing and delivering testing results.
Experts have said the key metric to watch is the number of people in hospital since official case counts can't capture the true magnitude of COVID-19's Omicron variant.
Data from St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton and Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) show over 75 Hamiltonians were in local hospitals with COVID-19 as of Christmas Eve.
St. Joe's is caring for 10 COVID patients and HHS is tending to 68 COVID patients. There are no more than eight people with the virus in both hospital networks's intensive care units, according to the data.
Provincewide, there are 480 people are hospitalized with COVID-19 and 176 people are in intensive care units.
The city's case positivity rate is at 8.3 per cent — for context, local contact tracing is overwhelmed at about three per cent.
All this comes as the city tries to vaccinate as many people as possible with first doses, second doses and booster shots.
Matthew Miller, an associate professor of infectious diseases and immunology at McMaster University, told CBC Hamilton while Omicron seems to lead to more mild symptoms, the general public may not understand what "mild illness" means.
"It doesn't mean you're walking around with sort of a minor sniffle, it basically means anything short of having to be hospitalized," he said.
"It doesn't mean you don't feel really awful for a really long time ... we don't have a good grasp on [long-term effects] of people with Omicron."
Miller adds that while two shots offer great protection against severe illness, people with only two doses are at much higher risk of getting infected by Omicron because it has more mutations that impact how antibodies bind.
"What these third doses do is they really ramp up the amount of antibodies present in our blood and those antibodies, when present in high numbers, can protect us from ever being infected at all," he said.
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