NC continues to shatter records in new daily COVID-19 cases; positivity rate still above 31%

For three days in a row, North Carolina added record-high new coronavirus cases and by Friday, that number had topped 28,000.

The number of people hospitalized on Friday has nearly reached levels seen during the delta wave in the fall. On Friday, more than 3,474 were hospitalized with the virus. Most of those people are within the capital region — that's Wake, Johnston, Franklin, Lee and Harnett counties.

Around a quarter of all people hospitalized on Friday were in the intensive care unit, according to DHHS. There were more patients in the ICU on Friday than there has been in three months.

Child COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to grow. On Friday, 66 children were in the hospital with the virus, which is the most reported since late November.

Only 10 ICU beds across those five counties in the capital region are available and 90% of all hospital beds are full, according to state data.

In a joint news conference on Thursday, doctors from Duke, UNC-REX and Wake Med hospitals all said they were nearing capacity, and begged people to get vaccinated. At all WakeMed hospitals, only 1 in 10 ICU patients are fully vaccinated, and at Duke, all the patients on ECMO, a form of life support used for only the sickest patients, are unvaccinated.

In the first six days of 2022, 57 people died in North Carolina from coronavirus. By comparison, in the first six days of 2021, 607 North Carolinians died.

While the state continues to see a record-high number of people get tested for COVID-19, the latest increase in testing is not driving case numbers up. The rate of people who are testing positive continues to hit record highs. On Friday, that rate was more than 31% — well above the state's goal of 5%. That means for every three tests results reported to the state, about one is positive.

Health officials maintain that the best protection against the omicron variant of COVID-19 is a booster shot. Studies show that the variant is able to evade a one- or two-dose vaccine quite well.

Around 28% of all cases reported in North Carolina in the week of Dec. 18 and Dec. 25 were among people who were vaccinated, according to a DHHS report released Thursday. Overall, however, only 11% of COVID-19 cases since Jan. 1, 2021 have been in vaccinated people and only 2.3% of fully-vaccinated people have tested positive for COVID-19.

There's no indication that the recent increase in omicron cases has prompted more people to get vaccinated against the virus. According to state data, there was a small increase in vaccinations in mid-November and early December, but last week, the state only administered around 15,000 first vaccine doses.