MOULTRIE, Ga. — Local health officials warn Colquitt County is in the early stage of another COVID surge.

The state of Georgia is experiencing the most new COVID-19 cases it’s had since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, but Colquitt County’s caseload is only beginning to climb.

“It’s surging from north to south,” Colquitt Regional Medical Center Assistant Vice President Matthew Clifton said in a Zoom call Wednesday morning.

Hospital President and CEO Jim Matney said the hospital and its affiliated clinics tested 203 people Tuesday with 63 of them coming back positive. 

Those numbers aren’t reflected in the state Department of Public Health’s website tracking COVID cases. That website, dph.georgia.gov/covid-19-daily-status-report, lists only a handful of new cases in the county each day since early October. Nonetheless, the trend there is also angling upward.

“It’s clear to me it’s surging,” Matney said.

Matney said the hospital’s emergency room had been seeing an average of 80 patients a day but by Tuesday that was up to 147.  That’s also translated to an increase in hospitalization. Matney said the 99-bed hospital is currently overcrowded with 102 in-patients.

The good news, he said, is the acuity of the current COVID variant is much less. That means most of the people with it aren’t as severely ill as those who had earlier variants.

The bad news is the current variant, called omicron, is less responsive to the antibody infusion treatments that were so effective against earlier variants, Clifton said. Because of a limited supply, those infusions are available only through the hospital emergency room.

Recently approved oral therapies are effective, he said, but the supply is limited and they’re being distributed to only certain pharmacies. Even the hospital doesn’t have them yet.

Also in limited supply are at-home COVID tests, Clifton said. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance Monday that reduced the isolation time from 10 days to five, but the Zoom call highlighted disagreement about details of the guideline. Clifton said the guideline applied only to individuals who tested positive for the coronavirus but had no symptoms, but hospital physician Dr. Woodwin Weeks said the guidance also states it applies to patients whose symptoms “are resolving” in that five-day period after a positive COVID test. Clifton and Weeks agreed the CDC needs to clarify its guidance.

The shorter isolation time reflects discoveries that people are most contagious between two days before symptoms appear and three days after they appear, so anyone without symptoms five days after a positive test is believed to be unlikely to infect anyone they come in contact with.

Discussions during the Zoom call did not mention vaccinations. The Department of Public Health reports 45% of Colquitt Countians have had at least one dose of a COVID vaccine; 41% are fully vaccinated (one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine or both doses of the Pfizer or Moderna regimens). Nine percent of the fully vaccinated have had a booster dose as well.

Nationally, health officials continue to tout vaccines for reducing the severity of COVID illness, even as breakthrough infections have raised questions about how effective they are for preventing the disease entirely.

Local health officials on the call emphasized the same public health recommendations that have been around since the beginning of the pandemic.

“As the COVID numbers increase, we continue to urge people to wear masks and social distance,” said Tonya Bozeman, director of the Colquitt County Health Department.

Matney encouraged others on the call to make masks available at their facilities and to encourage people to wear them.

“One thing that seems to be working is the masks,” he said.