DOUGLAS COUNTY- With local hospitals brimming, COVID cases rising and flu season coming, Douglas County Health Director Lindsay Huse is pleading with people to not let down their guard — or their face masks.

She used her weekly appearance before the Douglas County Board to make an urgent appeal to people to get vaccines against COVID and the flu, wear masks indoors, be socially distant, and be aware and cautious in settings where there may be a lot of unvaccinated people.

“While we were cautiously optimistic in previous weeks presenting this data, I really wanted to make sure that I was expressing concern today,” Huse told the County Board. “Especially having heard from our hospitals and knowing that flu season is on the way. And we still have RSV circulating. We kind of have a convergence of a lot of things besides COVID that are all kind of mixing to create a really bad situation for our hospitals.”

Hospital occupancy rates in metropolitan Omaha are higher than at any point during the pandemic, Huse said. The hospitals’ staffed beds have hovered around 90% full over the past week.

People are hospitalized for a host of reasons besides COVID. But COVID hospitalizations have been holding steady at an elevated level of about 190, with more than 30 of those people on ventilators, according to data Huse presented. The county recorded 10 more COVID deaths last week.

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