The holidays brought a huge demand for COVID tests, health officials said. But demand hasn’t led to delays at the University of Texas Medical Branch campuses, which have built up testing capacity during the most recent wave, said Dr. Janak Patel, the director of Infection Control and Healthcare Epidemiology at the medical branch. Hospitalizations and deaths haven’t increased significantly, he said. “Do not expect the illness to be mild,” Patel said. “You still can get prolonged high fevers. You still can get headaches and joint aches and fatigue that can last for several days. The outpatient illness is still pretty significant.”

The increase in cases is being felt across the county, including at its largest medical provider, the University of Texas Medical Branch, where hundreds of employees are out sick because of positive COVID-19 tests. About 300 of the medical branch’s 11,000 employees were quarantined as of Friday because they had tested positive for COVID-19, said Dr. Gulshan Sharma, chief medical officer. About half were front-line medical workers, and the number of quarantined is near that during the height of the delta variant surge, Sharma said.

While patient volume has remained steady during the pandemic, clinics are limited based on the number of providers and their caps on caseloads, UTMB officials said. UTMB Health Psychiatry Webster saw about 9,900 patients from September 2019 to August 2020; that number increased nearly 20% to about 11,800 patients seen from September 2020 to August 2021, according to UTMB data. while the introduction of telehealth has opened doors in terms of access, the demand is greatly outpacing the number of providers available for counseling, said Jeff Temple, a professor and licensed psychologist at UTMB. “There’s only so many hours and only so many people that an individual [provider] can see,” Temple said. “The increased access has helped, but the demand is so great that it still is leaving people lacking.

Dr. Prashant Rai, assistant professor, and associate director in the Neurology residency program at the University of Texas Medical Branch, wrote about researching brain fog in COVID-19 patients. “Our study showed the presence of brain fog/acute confusional state at admission or during hospitalization was associated with poorer outcomes overall, with these higher mortalities and increased need for intensive care support,” Rai wrote.

Unvaccinated individuals who were previously infected with COVID may not have as much natural immunity against the virus, especially when it comes to the new omicron variant. “I've never seen anything like this,” UTMB biochemistry professor Dr. Pei-Yong Shi said. Shi shared data from his research, showing how the level of natural immunity of unvaccinated individuals is nowhere near what it was in the past. In fact, it's about 16-fold lower than previous variants a month after the infection. The number drops even further if the infection was six months ago. Other ABC outlets also ran this story.

The rate of people testing positive for COVID-19 at University of Texas Medical Branch facilities tripled from about 5 percent of samples to 15 percent over the past week, an increase that has medical branch officials warning Galveston has joined the rest of the country in a variant-driven spike. Dr. Janak Patel, the director of Infection Control and Healthcare Epidemiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, called the jump in the positivity rate mind- boggling. “We tripled our positivity rate within a week,” Patel said. “Not even a week. Just in five days.”

Just this week, Omicron became the dominant COVID-19 variant in the U.S. It's now responsible for 73.2% of U.S. COVID-19 cases—a steep climb from the late November levels at 0.1%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “It’s already going very fast. Previously, almost 100% used to be Delta. That's why we need to closely monitor the increase of the Omicron in the population here,” Dr. Pei-Yong Shi, chair in innovations in molecular biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told Verywell.

A fresh surge of COVID-19 cases is appearing in Brazoria County as the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus sweeps across the country, though the number of severe cases requiring hospitalization has not risen sharply, area health officials said. “Although our inpatient census for COVID positive patients has slightly increased, we have seen a larger volume of positive cases through the outpatient setting as well as more patients seeking the antibody treatments we offer for COVID-positive patients,” said Beth Reimschissel, UTMB Health Angleton Danbury administrator and associate chief nursing officer.

New research from the University of Texas Medical Branch found that Filipino seafarers — who make up a third of the workforce that transports goods from around the world into the Port of Houston — often avoid or delay medical care when they get injured or sick for fear of workplace retaliation. “It’s the question of ‘how far can I go without seeking medical care through US hospitals and clinics?'” said Dr. Shannon Guillot Wright, the author of the paper documenting these experiences. “‘Can I call the second officer’s wife who is a nurse? Can I treat this burn myself? Are there antibiotics on board if my thumb gets cut off in machinery?’”