TRENTON, NJ – The omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus continues to grow across New Jersey despite the state having one of the highest vaccination rates in America. On Saturday, 34,000 new positive cases were confirmed by the New Jersey Department of Health including 28,512 positive PCR tests and 6,105 antigen tests. This figure does not include possibly tens of thousands of at-home antigen tests that have not been reported to local or state health officials.

The virus is prevalent in full vaccinated, boosted and unvaccinated New Jerseyans alike and the state’s mask mandates, vaccine mandates and regular testing have not stopped the omicron variant of the virus from spreading.

The number is expected to continue to increase into the New Year and New Jersey could soon see daily caseloads much higher, but state testing capacity has reached its breaking point. Many state testing facilities have been turning away patients and others are now books well into the middle of January for testing.

Despite the Biden Administration allocating $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill in March, states across the country are left without sufficient testing capability and the virus is spreading faster than it has since the start of the pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said the peak of the omicron outbreak could be reached by the end of January, meaning millions more Americans will be getting sick.

“Considering the size of the US and the country’s levels of vaccination, the peak “likely will be more than a couple of weeks, probably by the end of January, I would think,” Fauci thinks.

The good news is the omicron variant of the virus so far has not been reported to be as serious as the delta variant, with mild cold-like symptoms in most patients, recovering in 7-10 days.

The state today did not release the rate of transmission which is nearing the yet to be reached the milestone of 2.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy continues to urge residents to get tested, mask up and vaccinate, although none of those suggestions have slowed the pace of the virus into the New Year.

The left’s narrative of COVID-19 is now officially broken. Masks are not stopping omicron and the virus is spreading among the fully vaccinated and fully boosted population with the same symptoms as the unvaccinated population.

Now, even the media is admitting that the left’s two years of virus and vaccine shaming of the American public is not working.

“The morality tale superimposed onto the virus persists. As people in blue states get infected with Omicron, they seem to be following a script in which they go out of their way to prove that their infection was not due to misbehavior, God forbid—they got the vaccines and the booster and wear their masks everywhere they go and regularly get tested. See Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Cory Booker, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson for examples of the template,” said Laura Rosen Cohen of Newsweek in an excellent feature about the left’s COVID-19 shaming policies.

Outside of the United States, COVID experts are warning against unnecessary overvaccination, even predicting that the omicron variant could spread global herd immunity and make future variants harder to spread.

“Scientists argue that rolling out vaccines every three-to-four months simply isn’t ‘doable’ and may not even be necessary because of Omicron, which some believe will speed up the process of endemicity and consign days of sky-high hospitalization and death figures to history,” according to Professor Ian Jones of the University of Reading.

Studies in the United Kingdom and South Africa have shown that omicron patients are 50% to 80% less likely to be hospitalized from the latest variant.

“Basically, as the virus increases its infectiousness, it naturally attenuates over time,” said Dr. Tetsuo Nakayama, who is also the director of the Japanese Society of Clinical Virology.

“Though omicron is contributing to a record wave of infections, especially in the West, the newest addition to the World Health Organization’s list of variants of concern could bring about a sudden end to the pandemic as early as 2022, just like SARS vanished without a trace in two years, some experts said,” the Japan Times reported this week.

Experts mostly agree, COVID-19 is here to stay and will become a seasonal illness like the flu and in America, under the leadership of the Democrat party, the focus has been on vaccination and not treatment of the virus. Viral treatments have become political battle lines as the left pushes vaccination and the right pushes antiviral treatments to treat infected patients.

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Phil Stilton is the Editor and Publisher of Shore News Network, an independent digital newsroom providing original reporting on New Jersey, national news, government, public policy, public safety, courts, and community affairs.

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