Covid-19: US Sees Record 1.35M Cases In A Day, But Expert Says That Doesn't Tell Whole Story

 But that may not even be close to the actual number of cases.

"We're probably only diagnosing somewhere between one in five and one in 10 actual infections," Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday, Jan. 9 on CBS-TV.

Gottlieb added that there are "probably a lot of people walking around with asymptomatic infection who don't know it, but are spreading it."

That scenario could cause staffing issues for hospitals, and particularly in the coming weeks in the Midwest, said Gottlieb, the author of "Uncontrolled Spread," a new book examining, "Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic."

"What we're seeing right now across the country with the surge in cases and hospitalizations, it isn't so much a (hospital) bed issue as we saw during the first wave of the pandemic, and even during the winter surge last year, but a staffing issue," Gottlieb said Tuesday morning, Jan. 11 on MSNBC. 

"That's going to get more acute as the epidemic rolls into the Midwest where there's less hospital capacity overall and you have a lot of hospital systems, particularly around the Great Lakes region, that were already pressed by Delta, so they had high censuses to begin with, and now they're going to see Omicron waves on top of that."

In light of that, one positive note, Gottlieb noted, is that the average hospital stay for a COVID patient is much shorter than at other points during the pandemic.

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