The new year got off to a bad start on the coronavirus front. Post-Christmas cases have jumped from 112 to 167 in a single day, Yucatán health authorities said.
And since Sunday, daily COVID-19 cases are up 1,000%, according to health department data. An untold number of cases are presumed to have been missed by the health ministry, which has limited testing capabilities.
The jump in new cases began on Christmas, when infections rose from 18 to 38 in a day. The rise seemed like a false alarm when daily numbers fell on Monday to 16, then 15. But then the rapid rise of new cases began.
Doctors assume a combination of holiday festivities and the arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron variant are to blame.
Saturday’s daily briefing from the Yucatán health department counted 176 cases, resulting mainly in home quarantines. Hospitalizations fell by seven for a total of 34, but are up from 22 at the beginning of the week.
That’s just in public facilities. Mérida’s half-dozen private hospitals are not part of that tally.
Quarantine cases, in which patients present mild symptoms, rose nearly 40% to 589. One death and nine recoveries were reported Saturday.
Yucatán remains under the lowest-possible level of alert, a symbolic green on the epidemiological traffic light.
