Orange County’s COVID hospitalizations double in a week

“Omicron is clearly here. And the kind of rapid increase that we’re seeing, it’s unprecedented. In fact, I’ve been doing infectious disease research for over 20 years now and I haven’t seen any infection spread as rapidly as the Omicron variant is spreading now,” said UC Irvine epidemiologist [and associate professor of nursing] Sanghyuk Shin in a Thursday phone interview.