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.

In South Africa researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute took blood from about a dozen people who had been vaccinated with two shots of the Pfizer vaccine and looked to see how well their antibodies kill the virus. In the experiment, everyone's antibodies were able to neutralize an earlier version of the virus quite well. And that's a lot. "It's astonishing ... in terms of the reduction," said Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who has been doing similar experiments to determine the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against the coronavirus. This story was picked up by NPR affiliates across the country.

Microbiologist Pei-Yong Shi runs a high-containment laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Over Thanksgiving, his team began engineering a replica of the new variant to test against the antibodies generated by vaccines. But it doesn’t happen overnight: It will take about two weeks to build the omicron replica, another few days to confirm that it’s an accurate facsimile, and one more week to pit the virus against blood samples from vaccinated people. “I think there is a lot of overreaction, and we just have to sit tight,” Shi said. “There are no results yet, these are just the mutations. What does that mean? We have to see.”

Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch began engineering their own copy of the new COVID variant in local labs with genome data shared online. At the same time, researchers were working to get their hands on an isolate of the virus from a person confirmed to have been infected with it. The expert advice is to stay calm about omicron. “I think we have some concern, but it’s too early to worry a lot about this,” said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections & Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “The bad news is that this is a variant with a lot of mutations.”

UTMB’s Noelle Anastasio joined the Town Square with Ernie Manouse show on the Houston NPR station to talk about opioids and overdose deaths.

The first omicron variant case was confirmed Monday in Harris County, Judge Lina Hidalgo said. UTMB is one of the local hospitals performing genome sequencing in positive cases to identify the type of variant.

It’s important everyone get vaccinated and boosted, Drs. Meagan Berman and Richard Rupp wrote in their Vaccine Smarts column. Some may wish to be boosted with a different vaccine, but in the end, it’s just important to get whichever is available.

Without needles and without incisions, UTMB Galveston will be the first to treat prostate cancer with this new procedure.