MONROE COUNTY, Pa. — Doctors at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Pocono in East Stroudsburg are seeing more patients testing positive for the coronavirus, but it's not unusual to see a summer surge.
In fact, Dr. Jonathan Goldner, the Chief Medical Officer for Lehigh Valley Hospital-Pocono and Dickson City, says last summer's spike was much worse.
"If you look at the state, there were a little over 8,000 admissions in the last week for COVID," Doctor Goldner said. "If I look back at a year ago, the same time, it was 44,000 submissions, so we were doing really well with no admissions for COVID for several weeks, but we actually have about 8 patients in the hospital right now."
Dr. Goldner says different strains of the Omicron variant are causing this spike in cases.
"What we're seeing now is patients get sick, and we still get some patients that are hospitalized, but overall, with the amount of patients that have immunity and that's through either prior infections or vaccination, they don't tend to get as sick as they have been especially when the pandemic first occurred," said Dr. Goldner.
With those vaccines and medications like Paxlovid that treat COVID, Dr. Goldner says we are more prepared than this time last year.
He believes another vaccine may become available this fall to prevent a possible winter surge.
"The FDA is kind of pushing the vaccine makers to make what they call a monovalent vaccine, which is still a COVID vaccine, but it's going to target that certain strain of Omicron that appears to be more predominant now," Dr. Goldner.
He is encouraging people with underlying health conditions- and people over 65 who haven't gotten a booster shot to get one because immunity fades over time.
Check out WNEP’s YouTube channel.