Dozens of SC children hospitalized with COVID, as omicron runs rampant through the state
The four children’s hospitals in South Carolina had 54 children as inpatients with the coronavirus on Wednesday, half of them unvaccinated and the other half too young to get the shot, the state’s public health director said during a press conference.
Dr. Brannon Traxler said the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 is the highest number since the pandemic began.
She also said test result reporting remains sluggish. The state Department of Health and Environmental Control is working with labs to decrease the number of days it takes to get the test results, to make it closer to 48 to 72 hours.
It has happened that people’s five-day isolation period runs out before they hear whether they were positive, Traxler said.
Traxler renewed the call for more people to be vaccinated and, if symptoms develop, be tested and stay home. In all, 52.3% of South Carolina residents are fully vaccinated, she said.
In Columbia, the TourHealth testing site move from DHEC’s Bull Street headquarters to Columbia Place Mall will allow for eight lanes of cars, increasing the number of tests that can be done at one time and decreasing wait times. The mall location on Two Notch Road will offer testing and vaccinations. The Bull Street site will offer vaccines only, beginning Thursday.
At-home saliva test kits will be available at the mall as well, which will be open from 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week.
Traxler said DHEC has ordered 500,000 at-home antigen tests and received 100,000 of them. DHEC is working to determine how they will be distributed.
She said the number of cases — nearly 12,000 reported on Wednesday with 30% positivity rate — is too large and widespread at this point to say precisely where the virus is coming from.
“It’s coming from everywhere,” Traxler said.
When asked about schools going to e-learning due to increasing numbers of cases, Traxler said the benefit of that is the closure breaks the chain of transmission.