Freeman Health System in Joplin held its bi-weekly COVID-19 update on Wednesday. KRPS’s Fred Fletcher-Fierro has more.

A lot has changed in the past 40 days for healthcare workers in Southwest Missouri. On December 17, Freeman’s Infection Prevention and Control Manager Jessica Liberty stated that the Omicron variant of the Coronavirus had not been detected in the area. Fast-forward to yesterday, when Freeman’s Head of COVID services Dr. Rob McNab said that between 90-95% of all patients with COVID are infected with Omicron and that treatments hospitals have relied on in earlier periods of the pandemic are no longer effective. “You know, a lot of the older treatments like some of the monoclonal antibodies, things like BAM+, that were very effective against Delta were just completely ineffective against this new variant and because of that, there’s been a real phase-out of REGEN-COV and BAM + and lot of things that we were using in the community.”

As of Wednesday Freeman had 51 hospitalized COVID patients, two are on ventilators. That’s an increase of 17 patients over the past two weeks. For 89 9 KRPS, I’m Fred Fletcher-Fierro