SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – San Diego County officials said the county is seeing a big spike in COVID-19 cases following the Thanksgiving holiday.
The County Health and Human Services Agency reported 5,649 new cases this week, which is up from the 3,455 cases from the previous week.
“So, we’re actually now in the medium tier of risk. And of course, that worse than the lower tier than we were in before. And it just reflects that the fact that COVID cases are surging as they typically do when we have holidays,” Dr. Abisola Olulade, with Sharp Rees-Staley, said.
She said the impact of the rising cases is being seeing at their sites.
“We’re also seeing more people show up to our ERs and also to our urgent cares. So all of this is putting a strain on our health care system essentially,” Olulade said.
She told ABC 10News this holiday season is different than the COVID spike we saw last year.
“What we are seeing now is not just that we have an increase COVID cases. But, we’re actually seeing a very severe increase in flu cases and RSV cases. And this was not the case last year,” Olulade said.
With COVID, the flu and RSV still hanging around, there’s a hope that things can calm down to make sure the strain at hospitals and the health risk to the community doesn’t continue.
“We have to think about our healthcare resources as a community resource. We all have a responsibility to preserve this. We need to have hospital capacity to take care of not just people that are infected with COVID but all of the other things that we can control for,” Olulade said.
County health officials said while flu cases took a slight dip from this week compared to last week, the waster water data is showing an increasing trend.