As many prepare for another holiday weekend, be prepared for long lines and empty store shelves if you’re hoping to get tested for COVID-19 before the festivities.
The U.S. is now averaging close to 200,000 COVID-19 cases a day, a 47% increase from a week ago.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
“We’re certainly going to continue to see a surge for a while. I fully expect it will turn around,” Fauci said.
Fauci said don’t expect things to turn around in a week. For those looking to celebrate the new year, Fauci offered his recommendations.
“I have been telling people consistently that if you’re vaccinated and boosted and you have a family setting in the home with family and relatives,” he said Monday. “But when you’re talking about a New Year’s Eve party — we have 30, 40, 50 people celebrating, you do not know the status of their vaccination — I would recommend strongly stay away from that this year. There will be other years to do that, but not this year.”
It may feel like deja vu as doctors say they are getting ready for another year of battling a surging pandemic.
After closing for the holiday, COVID-19 testing sites reopened on Monday in Duval County. At the Emmet Reed Community Center in Jacksonville, there were no long lines, but a constant stream of people looking to get tested.
“I think it has definitely made us a bit more weary of seeing family, but we feel like if we’re tested and we’re negative, we should be OK,” said Jamicia Grigsby.
The Grigsby family is not alone. At the drive-thru COVID-19 testing site located at the former Kmart in Neptune Beach, lines wrapped around the building. The site reached capacity about 1 p.m. Monday, closing several hours early. When News4JAX went to a Walgreens and a CVS store in that same area on Monday, we were told that at-home test kits at those stores were sold out and that they wouldn’t get more until Thursday at the earliest.
In a meeting with governors on Monday, President Joe Biden acknowledged testing is lacking.
“We went from no over-the-counter tests in January to 46 million in October, 100 million in November and almost 200 million in December. But it’s not enough. It’s clearly not enough. If I had we’d known, we would have gotten harder quicker if we could have,” Biden said.
The president emphasized more resources will become available in the new year.
If you are looking to get tested, vaccinated or boosted ahead of the holiday weekend, News4JAX has compiled a list of COVID-19 testing, as well as vaccination, sites in Northeast Florida.
Meanwhile, a Jacksonville COVID-19 antibody treatment site now has fewer appointments available after changing how it administers the drug, a city spokesperson said Monday.
The city said the free Regeneron treatment available at the Joseph Lee Center located at 5120 Perry St. is now being administered using IV therapy. Previously, the site used injections to treat patients. The city said IV therapy takes longer and is more labor-intensive, so the number of available appointments has decreased.
The city said it still has enough supply of the drug that has been used to fight against early COVID-19 infections.
But doctors are warning that Regeneron and another antibody drug from Eli Lilly are unlikely to work against the new omicron variant, which has become the dominant strain in the U.S. Last week, the government paused the distribution of the COVID-19 antibody treatments because they are not expected to be effective.