OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – The number of new COVID-19 cases reported for New Year’s Day is a single day record.
5,119 new cases were reported, along with 38 new deaths.
“I think we’re going to see increasing risk, increasing spike in cases, some symptomatic, some asymptomatic over the next several weeks,” Dr. Dale Bratzler with OU Health said on Wednesday.
He says cases usually don’t show up in the data for about two weeks, and there are likely more cases than reported because testing is going down.
“Most of us expect somewhere 10 days for 14 days after Christmas, we’re very likely to start to see case counts start going up again just on the basis of those holiday events,” Bratzler said.
The State Health Department says 77 percent of the New Year’s Day numbers were tests done after Christmas. 87 percent were tests done in the past two weeks.
Experts say people need to be careful to reduce infections.
“Even though the United States only has 4.2 percent of the world’s population, we have a quarter of all of the cases that have been confirmed in the world, which is unbelievable to me, we’ve done so poorly at slowing the spread of this particular virus,” Bratzler said.
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