It happened so fast — just as experts warned it would. CDC reported yesterday that an estimated 73% of new Covid cases in America this past week are the Omicron variant.
I want to write about what is happening in New York City right now (population 8.8 million). Covid is spreading across this city more extensively than anywhere else, and our official count of new cases is shattering records. But I don’t know if everybody really understands that that’s just the visible tip of the iceberg. Does everyone get how fast this virus jumps from person to person, and the factors involved that make it absolutely impossible for authorities to know the actual number of positive cases? Here are four reasons why.
(1) PCR TESTING SITES ARE OVERWHELMED — and you have to stand in line, in the cold, for hours if you want to get tested. Consider this anecdote about NYC resident Nina Clark:
With temperatures hovering near freezing, Nina Clark joined the testing line for the third time since her symptoms started Thursday. Once again, she ended up walking away.
“I stood there in the cold and said, ‘I can’t do this,’” she said. “Everywhere you go, there’s a line.”
Temperatures yesterday were a very chilly 37F and windy. So, yeah, most sick and symptomatic people can’t afford, healthwise, to do what it takes to get PCR tested. And many of them also wouldn’t want to expose others to what they’ve got. I have friends who have said the same — they couldn’t do it, couldn’t wait hours in a line. So when you look at the official Covid case counts… many of these actually sick and symptomatic people aren’t counted. And many more who know they got exposed… working people, parents, elderly, and anyone whose life already feels maxed out or whose body already feels tired and challenged… they all also cannot afford, health-wise or stamina-wise or time-wise, to spend hours standing in a line in the cold outdoors.
So none of these people who wish they could get tested, are being tested and counted in the numbers… and some significant % of them do have Covid.
(2) So that leaves us with at-home Rapid Testing… but YOU CAN’T BUY A RAPID TEST KIT ANYWHERE IN NYC right now. Shelves are all stripped bare. You can’t obtain one even if you want to. And then there’s the socioeconomic piece: even when these test kits were available for sale, they cost around $20 per single use kit. Who can afford that, out of their own pockets, and who can’t?
So here we are: a LOT of symptomatic and exposed and worried people all over NYC who would be rapid-testing themselves and their family members at home right now if they could, are not testing at all. Because they can’t. So they, too, are below the radar in terms of official case counts.
(3) HOME SELF-TESTERS ARE NOT REPORTING THEIR RESULTS. Even among those of us who do have self-testing kits for home use, when we use them, many of us are not doing anything with the results — even when positive — except texting recent contacts, maybe posting it on social media. I can personally name three positive covid cases in the past 48 hours who used their at-home rapid test, found out it was positive... and just told who they felt it was right to tell, that’s it, and they are now quarantining at home. This pattern is being replicated right now with people all over the city. They, too, are not being included in the NYC case count.
(4) NEGATIVE TEST RESULTS CANNOT KEEP UP WITH A DISEASE THIS FAST. You may have read about that Christmas party in Oslo, Norway where more than 100 people got infected with Omicron. The frightening detail here is that all the party’s attendees had submitted a negative Covid test just 1 to 2 days prior. Omicron blows up fast in our upper respiratory tracts. You can literally test negative at sunset and then feel symptomatic when you wake the next morning. So when everyone all over New York City who thinks they might have Covid goes to the trouble of testing, gets a neg result, and breathes a sigh of relief… they may in fact be infected.
I don’t mean to suggest that everyone in New York City has Covid. But I do mean to suggest that the official daily new cases count of just 10K, or whatever exact number it will be today, is merely a clue pointing to a much larger real number that is not possible to even approximate.
Stay safe everyone. Good health to us all.