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Mass. reports 21,137 new COVID-19 cases, 36 new deaths

Newly reported cases: 21,137

Total confirmed cases: 1,038,566

Newly reported deaths: 36

Total confirmed deaths: 19,773

Newly reported tests: 119,292

Total tests: 36,155,201

Percent positivity (seven-day average): 16.44%

Hospitalized patients: 1,817

Hospitalized patients who are fully vaccinated: 631

ICU patients: 382

Intubated patients: 250

View an interactive version of the state’s dashboard here.

FDA expected to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech booster shots for 12- to 15-year-olds by early next week

The Food and Drug Administration is expected by early next week to authorize booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds, according to two people familiar with the FDA’s plan.

Some FDA officials had originally hoped to authorize a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine this week but faced scheduling challenges related to the holidays, according to the people with knowledge of the agency’s plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe developing actions.

The FDA decision would then be reviewed by vaccine advisers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that agency’s top official this week vowed to move quickly on recommending the booster shots if the CDC’s advisers concurred with FDA.

“Of course, the CDC will swiftly follow as soon as we hear from them, and I’m hoping to have that in the days to weeks ahead,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday on CNN.

Federal officials, public health experts and a growing number of parents have raised concerns that younger adolescents have been left disproportionately vulnerable to the fast-spreading omicron variant compared with other populations.

Older teenagers are already eligible for boosters, and younger children have more recently received their initial vaccine doses, which means they probably have retained more immune protection than children who were vaccinated earlier.

The omicron variant also has been linked to a rapid increase in pediatric hospitalizations this month.

The FDA’s plan was first reported by the New York Times.

The FDA declined to comment.

Pfizer referred questions about the timing of booster shot authorization to the agency.

“As the booster is already authorized for 16 and over, we are confident regulators are making every effort to look for ways to preserve a high level of protection against the virus across broad populations,” Jerica Pitts, a Pfizer spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

Biden administration officials have urged Americans to get booster shots to raise their immune protection against the omicron variant, which has been shown to evade antibodies conferred by prior infections or months-old vaccinations.

About 45% of the population age 18 and older has received a vaccine booster, White House coronavirus coordinator Jeffrey Zients said at a news briefing Wednesday.

“But as the doctors continually emphasize: Everybody who is eligible should go get boosted as soon as possible,” Zients added.

Expanding booster eligibility to more children would “be much welcomed news, but it will have limited impact on the current omicron surge,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He has warned that the fast-spreading omicron variant will challenge the nation’s health system.

“By the time we could put in place vaccination locations and get kids scheduled, together with delayed improving immunity, [the omicron] surge is likely over,” Osterholm said.

Wellesley sports suspended due to ‘major increase’ of COVID cases

Wellesley Public Schools announced administrators have opted to suspend the winter season of student athletics indefinitely after a “major increase” of COVID-19 cases among athletes.

“After consultation with the Wellesley Public Schools Administration and the Wellesley Health Department regarding the increase of positive Covid cases and in particular the major increase of cases on our athletic teams we have come to the conclusion that we need to suspend the winter season until further notice,” a statement posted Tuesday on the schools’ Athletic Department webpage reads. “This means no in person practices, games, meets or competitions.”

According to the district’s COVID-19 Dashboard, there have been 45 cases reported among high school students alone since Dec. 25, with 155 cases across the entire school system.

“Our wrestling team was affected. Our girls basketball team was affected, boys hockey team affected, boys basketball (team) affected,” Athletics Director John Brown told WCVB. “It was all over the place.”

According to the news station, the high school boasts a student vaccination rate of over 80 percent.

“While the case numbers are growing, they’re not necessarily seeing the kinds of intense medical reactions to the virus that we have seen previously, which is good news,” Superintendent David Lussier told the outlet. “I think that is a reflection of the high vaccination rate.”

Lussier said school officials hope the suspension will only be temporary.

Wellesley’s decision follows a similar move by Boston Public Schools, which announced last week all sports games and practices are suspended through Jan. 10, or possibly longer, amid the latest virus surge, The Boston Globe reported.

What to know about at-home COVID-19 tests and the omicron variant

Do at-home COVID-19 tests detect the omicron variant?

Yes, but U.S. health officials say early data suggests they may be less sensitive at picking it up.

Government recommendations for using at-home tests haven’t changed. People should continue to use them when a quick result is important.

“The bottom line is the tests still detect COVID-19 whether it is delta or alpha or omicron,” says Dr. Emily Volk, president of the College of American Pathologists.

Government scientists have been checking to make sure the rapid tests still work as each new variant comes along. And this week, the Food and Drug Administration said preliminary research indicates they detect omicron, but may have reduced sensitivity. The agency noted it’s still studying how the tests perform with the variant, which was first detected in late November.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said the FDA wanted to be “totally transparent” by noting the sensitivity might come down a bit, but that the tests remain important.

There are many good uses for at-home tests, Volk says. Combined with vaccination, they can make you more comfortable about gathering with family and friends.

If you’ve been exposed to a person who tested positive but you don’t have symptoms, a rapid test five days later can give a good indication of whether you caught the virus. It can also help if you’re not sure whether your runny nose or sore throat is COVID-19.

But consider the context when looking at results. If you feel sick after going out to a nightclub in an area with high infection rates, for example, you should look at a negative result from an at-home test with a little more skepticism, Volk says.

Following up with a PCR test is a good idea, she says. Those tests are more accurate and are done at testing sites and hospitals.

Why are so many flights being canceled? And when will things improve?

The forces that have scrambled thousands of flights since Christmas Eve could ease in January, but that’s cold comfort to the millions of flyers with New Year’s plans.

And if 2021 has taught us anything, it’s that 2022 will likely be just as unpredictable.

Here’s a look at what has mucked up flights for thousands of people this holiday season, and what could happen over the next few weeks.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Airlines weren’t spared from the spread of the omicron variant, which knocked out flight crews at airlines that had already reduced the size of their workforces following the collapse of air travel in 2020.

The wave of omicron infections arrived at the same time that crowds began to pack airports for holiday travel. Then the Pacific Northwest and other areas were slammed with cold and heavy snowstorms.

The convergence of all three forced airlines to cancel thousands of flights starting on Christmas Eve. As of Thursday afternoon, about 7,800 flights departing from, going to, or within the U.S. have been scratched, according to flight-tracking firm FlightAware. More than 1,100 of those were on Thursday.

The U.S. was not alone. There have been thousands of cancellations abroad. European and Australian airlines report the same logistical issues dealing with COVID-19 and flight crews. Chinese airlines have made up a large percentage of cancellations.

To put that in perspective, most flights were OK. There are nearly 70,000 flights a day, globally, said aviation data provider Cirium.

WHEN MIGHT THINGS IMPROVE?

U.S. health officials this week halved guidance to five days of quarantine for asymptomatic Americans who catch the coronavirus. Airline industry experts say that will alleviate the staffing issues that have forced airlines to scratch flights — but the flight attendants unions say they’re wary of the change and its effect on worker health. Yet cases of omicron, the fast-spreading variant of the COVID-19 virus, continue to rise. And that isn’t the only problem.

It could take up to a week for airlines to fully recover from lingering bad weather, said Jim Hetzel, an expert on airline operations at Cirium.

Getting past the holiday rush will also help. January and February are the year’s slowest travel months after the New Year’s rush, said Willis Orlando, senior flight expert at Scott’s Cheap Flights. “There should be a lot more room for airline to cut routes, reassign pilots and have staff in reserve.’’

Some airlines have also recognized that the confluence of the holiday rush, omicron and bad weather make it impossible to continue with current schedules.

JetBlue said Wednesday that it was reducing its schedule through mid-January in hopes of giving customers more time to to make alternate plans rather than suffer last-minute cancellations — although still more cancellations remain likely.

“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that these schedule changes bring,” said spokesperson Derek Dombrowski. He said crew members are volunteering to work extra hours and managers are pitching in where they’re trained to do so.

Alaska Airlines urged flyers who could to reschedule for after Jan. 2, as it was reducing Seattle departures and more cancellations and delays were expected this week. Delta and United spokespeople said they could not predict when operations would normalize.

WAS THIS SPATE OF CANCELLATIONS UNUSUAL?

Inclement weather is a sporadic but constant threat to travel in winter. A 2021 rebound in travel, when airlines didn’t have enough staff to keep up with demand, led to heavy cancellations and delays earlier this year.

Southwest Airlines struggled in summer and fall because of delays and cancellations, which it blamed on computer problems, staffing shortages and bad weather. American canceled over 1,000 flights over Halloween weekend because of staffing shortages. Delta canceled dozens of flights around Easter this year because of staffing problems.

COULD THE AIRLINES HAVE DONE ANYTHING TO PREVENT THIS?

Omicron was a shock to the system and its speed broadsided just about everyone, airlines included.

“This is kind of an extreme circumstance,” said Hetzel, the operations expert at Cirium.

Some airlines were hit harder than others simply because of where they tend to operate. Southwest and American had lower geographic exposure to the areas of the U.S. where weather was awful, and less of its staff is based in areas where COVID-19 cases are surging, said Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth.

Labor groups, however, say more could have been done, like offering extra pay to flight attendants during the holiday earlier on. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents 50,000 workers at 17 airlines including United, Alaska, Frontier and Spirit, said Delta started offering on Christmas Eve but should have done it sooner. The union that represents American’s flight attendants said it probably helped that the airline recalled staffers who were on leave. In a November memo, the chief operating officer at American noted that nearly 1,800 flight attendants returned from leave in November, and 800 would return in December, along with 600 new hires.

Syth, of Raymond James, did an analysis of which airlines she thought were more at risk of operational problems during the holiday season, which drives most of the fourth quarter’s profitability for airlines. She found that airlines that were conservative with scheduling were hit as well as those that were aggressive.

“This leads me to believe that this has more to do with the uniqueness of omicron-variant and the greater impact it is having in the Northeast currently than a failure on the part of airlines to prepare,” Syth said.

The airlines were more prepared for the holidays than they were for hail and thunderstorms that snarled travel earlier this year, said Charles Leocha, president and founder of the consumer advocacy group Travelers United.

“It’s a far cry from the episodes we were facing in the summer and autumn when we had airlines that were out of whack for two or three days,’’ Loecha said. “It’s been a really good effort. The airlines have paid more money to keep people on reserve and they’re paying more money to keep people flying.’’

Airlines have been hiring. The U.S. Department of Transportation says that as of October, U.S. passenger airlines employed more than 400,000 full-time workers, but that’s about 9% fewer than they employed two years ago.

Even critics say airlines this year were at the mercy of the pandemic.

“Airlines should have planned better and the (Transportation Department) should have monitored airline capacity and required ready reserves of equipment and personnel given the large federal subsidies since 2020,’’ said Paul Hudson, president of the advocacy group FlyersRights.org. “But the omicron variant high infection rate is primarily to blame in the holiday season disruptions.’’

WHAT SHOULD TRAVELERS DO IF AIRLINES CANCEL THEIR FLIGHTS?

If your flight is cancelled, most airlines will put you on the next available plane to your destination free of charge. “They will figure a way to get you there. You don’t have to pay anything extra,” Leocha said.

If you cancel your trip instead of taking an alternative flight, you are entitled to your money back, even if you had nonrefundable tickets. When they cancel flights, airlines tend to push customers toward vouchers for future flights instead of offering a full refund. Orlando, of Scott’s Cheap Flights, urged travelers to remember their right to get their money back. “Airlines make it very easy to allow them to keep your money,’’ he said.

You also can ask the airline to transfer your ticket to another airline, but it is are not obligated to do so. Likewise, airlines are not required to reimburse you for hotel rooms, cabs or other expenses.

Firefighters save horse that fell through ice in Warwick

A horse that fell through ice was rescued in Warwick on Wednesday.

The Warwick Fire Department received a call from someone reporting that the horse was trapped in icy water on White Road, and the fire chief was the first to arrive at the scene, fire officials wrote on Facebook.

Firefighters put on cold water suits and broke up the ice so the horse could get out of the water.

Read the full story on BostonGlobe.com.

Charlie Baker on COVID-19 testing site lines: ‘People are gonna have to be patient on this one’

Gov. Charlie Baker says Massachusetts has one of the highest COVID-19 testing rates in the country.

That doesn’t mean you still won’t have to wait.

As the omicron variant propels the state’s COVID-19 infection rates to unprecedented levels in the midst of the holiday season, some Massachusetts testing sites have seen hours-long lines of residents seeking to check their status, either as a precaution before a gathering or because they have symptoms.

“People are gonna have to be patient on this one,” Baker told reporters during a press conference Thursday in Cambridge.

While the Republican governor said that Massachusetts has conducted the most or second-most COVID-19 tests per resident of any state since the beginning of the year, he said the surge has affected the sites’ staffing levels.

“We’re gonna continue to do what we can to make our testing infrastructure bigger, but we have some of the same issues with staffing,” Baker said. “It’s primarily a staff issue that almost everybody else in today’s economy has. But we know it’s important. We really appreciate the fact that people take advantage of these sites and take advantage of these tests as they are available.”

After vaccinations and boosters, Baker said the tests are “one of the best things” individuals can do if they’re around people they don’t see on a regular basis.

He also expressed hope the more accessible rapid take-home COVID-19 tests would help alleviate the stress on the state’s PCR-testing sites. Baker’s administration bought 2.1 million rapid tests earlier this month for communities with high poverty rates to distribute for free. And state officials announced Wednesday that they had agreed to a deal allowing cities and towns — as well as schools and nonprofits — to purchase rapid tests directly from manufacturers at lower, state-negotiated prices.

“As those tests start to land, and cities and towns start to distribute them, they should help take some of the pressure off those testing sites,” Baker said.

President Joe Biden’s administration has begun to work with other states that have seen particularly high demand to set up federally backed free testing sites. However, Baker indicated Thursday that his administration was not pursuing one of those centers.

“The federal government is struggling to deliver on a number of the commitments that they’ve made to states already, and I take a lot of pride in the fact that we do have one of the largest testing infrastructures in the country,” he said.

Baker said he had “been very aggressively communicating” to the federal government about the need for more rapid COVID-19 tests, given how quickly they return results. And with the new bulk purchasing agreements, he said cities and towns could use federal COVID-19 relief funds to directly buy rapid tests from the manufacturers.

“But you know, honestly, at this point in time, my message would still be the same,” Baker said. “We have more testing infrastructure than just about anybody else. But people are going to have to be patient.”

How does your 9-year-old’s hockey team rank nationally?

It was after midnight in the middle of a November week, and Neil Lodin, founder of MYHockey Rankings, was hunched over a computer in his sparsely furnished home office, feeding the beast.

The results of more than 10,000 youth hockey games had come in over the weekend and awaited approval. Lodin needed to delete duplicates, resolve complaints and watch for statistical anomalies. Most of all, he had to rank teams.

Lodin, 54, toiled in suburban Indianapolis. His son, Ian Lodin, 27, had been preparing the website for hours from his apartment 360 miles away in Pittsburgh. They labored in silence, save for the clacking of their keyboards, to update their weekly rankings of roughly 13,000 traveling youth hockey teams spanning age groups from 9 to 18.

By dawn Wednesday, throngs of youth hockey coaches, parents and players would be online, eager for what the Lodins would serve up.

“There are people around the country who talk about they or their kids getting up on Wednesday mornings and checking the rankings,” said Neil Lodin, a former computer programmer who created the algorithm that powers his site.

MYHockey Rankings — as much a part of North American youth hockey as hot chocolate and hand warmers — has been called a salvation by coaches who depend on it to help them schedule games against teams at roughly the same level of talent. Scouts use it to identify teams to watch.

Detractors, including a blogger who called MYHockey Rankings “the worst website for youth hockey … ever,” complain that the rankings fuel the parent-driven culture of the sport and emphasize winning over player development.

“These rankings are as close to biblical as you can possibly get on a youth hockey scale,” said Sean Green, who coaches a squirt team (9- and 10-year-olds) for the Allegheny Badgers outside Pittsburgh. Still, he said, the rankings can be destructive. “Development should be key, but the problem is once rankings get involved, development goes out the window.”

MYHockey Rankings draws 340,000 unique visitors and 10 million page views a month when the season is in swing, according to the Lodins, and daily traffic spikes to 500,000 page views when new rankings are released each week.

“I think part of it is it’s fun to look at,” said Darren Palaszewski, who coaches a squad of 12-year-old girls in Amherst, New York, a Buffalo suburb. “It’s the only thing out there quantitatively to see where you are.”

Aesthetically, MYHockey Rankings is underwhelming. Its interface is clunky and bland.

But the site features an array of statistics for teams in its database, all of them mined by the Lodins or generated from thousands of coaches and parents who voluntarily provide information to keep their teams in the ranking loop.

The site contains information on 24,000 teams in all, including high school, junior and college squads. Through the course of the hockey season, as more games are played and scores are culled, the Lodins expect to have enough data to assign a ranking to about 18,000 teams.

Visitors can find teams’ win-loss records, their schedules, how many goals they have scored or allowed during the season and the projected goal differential of any game they might play against any opponent in the system.

But most people come for the rankings, which, for many, have come to define a team’s worth, for better or worse.

Search for Competition

Neil Lodin insists that was not what he set out to accomplish 18 years ago when he began analyzing the data of teams in a handful of Midwestern states.

In 2003, as Lodin tells it, Ian Lodin was playing squirt hockey in suburban Indianapolis on a team that regularly steamrollered opponents, thanks in part to a particularly talented player. At the request of Ian’s coach, Neil Lodin set about finding a way to identify appropriate competition within driving distance.

“It wasn’t about being the best,” Lodin said. “It was about figuring out who would give us competitive games.”

He compiled a list of every travel team in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan in his son’s age group. Then, he spent weeks recording scores he found by combing each team’s websites.

“One of the things I started doing was looking at who played whom and trying to say, ‘OK, we played that team and we beat them by five, and they lost by six to that other team, so that should be good,’ ” Lodin said.

Lodin, who grew up in Minnesota and studied mathematics and computer science at Minnesota State University Moorhead, soon came up with a formula for ranking teams.

He began sharing his computations in online youth hockey forums. By 2006, he had fielded so many requests to apply his formula to other teams around the Midwest that he launched MYHockey Rankings. (The curious amalgam of capital letters is a nod to the original name of his initiative: “Midwest Youth Hockey Rankings.”)

The site is financed by advertising as well as memberships that offer privileges like the opportunity to add rosters and player statistics. Individual memberships sell for $30 a year; those for youth hockey associations range from $69 to $299 annually.

Neil Lodin left computer programming in 2012 to work on the site full time, and Ian Lodin joined him four years ago as the director of business development.

Most of Neil Lodin’s time is spent helping run an offshoot business, MYHockey Tournaments, which operates tournaments in 19 cities in the United States and promises “to bring the best-matched competition together.” He would not disclose financial figures for either company.

How the Rankings Work

Lodin’s algorithm computes each team’s average goal differential and strength of schedule and assigns a numerical rating that tops out at 99.99.

The ratings of closely ranked teams are typically separated by hundredths of a percentage point, with each percentage point equating to a one-goal differential.

So a team with a rating of 99.99 would be expected to beat a team with a rating of 98.99 by a goal. A game between teams with ratings of, say, 99.99 and 99.55 would be expected to go either way.

For a practical application, consider the peewee level, children 11-12 years old, in the United States.

Teams in that age group were recently ranked 1 through 1,397, with the Chicago Reapers AAA team on top at 99.99 and the Troy Bruins B team of Ohio at the bottom at 60.19. In theory, the Reapers would trounce the Bruins by 40 goals should they ever face off.

Between the two extremes, however, are clumps of teams whose ratings suggest they would be competitive. For example, there are 63 teams with a rating between 75.00 and 75.99.

Of course, the actual results of some games fall outside their projected goal differential. When that happens, the information is fed back into the system, and the Lodins generate new ratings and rankings.

By and large, the site’s biggest fans and harshest critics agree that the ratings tend to be a fairly accurate barometer of most matches.

Chris Collins directs the Bishop Kearney Selects, an elite program in Rochester, New York, with four teams of teenagers and a travel budget in the six figures.

“As a program director trying to build schedules for four teams and pick and choose where we’re going to spend money and send our teams, it’s an extremely valuable resource for me,” Collins said.

Even USA Hockey, the sport’s national governing body, turns to the Lodins each year for information that the organization can use to award at-large bids to its national tournaments for 14-year-olds and up.

“Let’s face it,” said Ken Martel, the organization’s director of player development, “the site has collected a lot of really good data.”

Potential Downsides

At the same time, Martel said, he fears the weight given to the rankings by some coaches, parents and youth hockey associations has had a toxic impact on player development and the cost of the game.

Stories abound in youth hockey circles of organizations that recruit promising players as young as 11 and 12 who live hundreds of miles away in a bid to bolster their rankings.

In extreme cases, they end up creating superteams that can find suitable opponents only by traveling vast distances to other superteams.

“You have teams, because of these rankings, that won’t play teams in their local area,” Martel said. “They’ll drive past six teams or get on an airplane, God forbid. You’ve just made hockey more expensive.”

Hockey is already the costliest youth sport, with parents who spend an average of $2,583 per child annually, according to the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program, which issues a yearly status report on youth sports.

Because the algorithm considers average goal differentials, teams can defeat opponents they are projected to beat but still fall in the rankings because they don’t win by a wide enough margin. The reverse is also true.

Consequently, some coaches bench weaker players even in lopsided victories, harming their development. And parents have been known to criticize a coach for pulling the goalie in a tight game and surrendering an empty-net goal that blew the projected goal differential.

For Martel, instances like those suggest things have gone too far.

“We should not be ranking kids nationally at 9 years of age,” he said.

None of these anecdotes surprise the Lodins, who said they kept a list of coaches and teams notorious for trying to game their system. Recently, Ian caught a coach trying to sneak the score of a game the team had won three months earlier into the rankings. Both teams had agreed the exhibition match would not count toward their rankings, but the winning coach reneged because the margin of victory would have helped his team’s standing.

“There are some individuals who are up to funky stuff,” Ian Lodin said.

Neil Lodin said funky stuff was the exception. He answered the site’s critics generally by citing a single statistic: the average margin of victory of games in the system.

“That number has decreased over time,” he said. “That tells me that the sport is getting more competitive, people know who they’re playing, they’re avoiding 11-0 games. I think that’s good.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

U.S. children hospitalized with COVID in near-record numbers

SEATTLE (AP) — The omicron-fueled surge that is sending COVID-19 cases rocketing in the U.S. is putting children in the hospital in close to record numbers, and experts lament that most of the youngsters are not vaccinated.

“It’s just so heartbreaking,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious-disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It was hard enough last year, but now you know that you have a way to prevent all this.”

During the week of Dec. 21-27, an average of 334 children 17 and under were admitted per day to hospitals with the coronavirus, a 58% increase from the week before, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The previous peak over the course of the pandemic was in early September, when child hospitalizations averaged 342 per day, the CDC said.

On a more hopeful note, children continue to represent a small percentage of those being hospitalized with COVID-19: An average of over 9,400 people of all ages were admitted per day during the same week in December. And many doctors say the youngsters coming in now seem less sick than those seen during the delta surge over the summer.

Two months after vaccinations were approved for 5- to 11-year-olds, about 14% are fully protected, CDC data shows. The rate is higher for 12- to 17-year-olds, at about 53%.

The issue is timing in many cases, said Dr. Albert Ko, professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. Younger children were not approved for the vaccine until November, and many are only now coming up on their second dose, he said.

Offit said none of the vaccine-eligible children receiving care at his hospital about a week ago had been vaccinated, even though two-thirds had underlying conditions that put them at risk — either chronic lung disease or, more commonly, obesity. Only one was under the vaccination age of 5.

The scenes are heart-wrenching.

“They’re struggling to breathe, coughing, coughing, coughing,” Offit said. “A handful were sent to the ICU to be sedated. We put the attachment down their throat that’s attached to a ventilator, and the parents are crying.”

None of the parents or siblings was vaccinated either, he said.

The next four to six weeks are going to be rough, he said: “This is a virus that thrives in the winter.”

Overall, new cases in Americans of all ages have skyrocketed to the highest levels on record: an average of 300,000 per day, or 2 1/2 times the figure just two weeks ago. The highly contagious omicron accounted for 59% of new cases last week, according to the CDC.

Still, there are early indications that the variant causes milder illness than previous versions, and that the combination of the vaccine and the booster seems to protect people from its worst effects.

In California, 80 COVID-19-infected children were admitted to the hospital during the week of Dec. 20-26, compared with 50 in the last week of November, health officials said.

Seattle Children’s also reported a bump in the number of children admitted over the past week. And while they are less seriously ill than those hospitalized over the summer, Dr. John McGuire cautioned that it is early in the omicron wave, and the full effect will become apparent over the next several weeks.

New York health authorities have also sounded the alarm.

The number of children admitted to the hospital per week in New York City with COVID-19 went from 22 to 109 between Dec. 5 and Dec. 24. Across all of New York state, it went from 70 to 184. Overall, almost 5,000 people in New York were in the hospital with COVID-19.

“A fourfold increase makes everybody jump with concern, but it’s a small percentage,” Ko said of the New York City figures. “Children have a low risk of being hospitalized, but those who do are unvaccinated.”

Dr. Al Sacchetti, chief of emergency services at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, New Jersey, likewise said vaccinated children are handling the omicron outbreak extremely well.

“It makes a big difference in how these kids tolerate the disease, particularly if the child’s got some medical issues,” he said.

COVID-19 deaths have proved rare among children over the course of the pandemic. As of last week, 721 in the U.S. had died of the disease, according to data reported to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The overall U.S. death toll is more than 800,000.

Almost 199,000 child COVID-19 cases were reported in the week of Dec. 16-23, the pediatrics group said. That was about 20% of the more than 950,000 total cases reported that week.

While many of these children will recover at home, they may have contact with others who are at much greater risk, said Dr. Jason Terk, a pediatrician in North Texas. He cared for a 10-year-old boy with COVID-19 who managed the disease well, but his father got sick and died, he said.

“The death of a parent is devastating, but the toxic stress for a young person in this situation is difficult to measure,” he said.

These 2 fixes might turn around the Celtics

In Boston, we have always had outsized expectations for our sports teams. That has only become heightened in the past 20 years, when the city has seen its four largest men’s pro sports teams win 12 championships. And it hasn’t just been them. The New England Revolution reached the MLS Cup Final in 2014. Further out of the spotlight, the women’s ice hockey team the Boston Pride have won their championship, the Isobel Cup, twice in its five-year history – the first Cup, in 2016, and the most recent Cup earlier in 2021. We demand greatness here, bottom line.

So the fits and starts of the Boston Celtics the past season and a half have been incredibly frustrating. As such, the finger pointing has been rampant. Danny Ainge stepped down as lead executive at the end of last season, and while ownership never wavered in their support of Ainge, it’s clear that his choices the past few seasons had not worked out as well as the team and its fans would have hoped. And Brad Stevens hasn’t exactly been batting 1.000 since taking that chair, but for today, let’s look at the present.

The team’s problems from last season have inversed. After finishing the 2020-21 season 16th in defensive rating, and allowing 111.2 points per game, the Celtics are ninth in defensive rating and are allowing 107.5 points per game. This is terrific, and certainly something to build on as the team rolls into the new year. But the offense has not been as productive. After finishing 10th in offensive rating last season and scoring 112.6 points per game, the team currently ranks 22nd in offensive rating this season and is scoring 107.8 points per game.

As most people diagnose the team’s issues, they point fingers at Marcus Smart. The region’s sports media has long hated Smart, and that feeling filtered down to the general population. The media wants someone who dishes out more assists per game – Smart is currently tied for 24th in assists per game, with 5.5. The only problem with that is that none of the players who rank higher are imminently acquirable, and most don’t play the defense that Smart does. They are all either superstars, on contending teams, or not really point guards (Tyrese Haliburton comes to mind here). If you squint, you can see a couple of guys who might be available – Damian Lillard, D’Angelo Russell, Haliburton, Malcolm Brogdon – but those players a) don’t have the same defensive reputation, b) will cost a significant amount of talent/assets and c) it’s not a slam dunk that Smart would even be part of said package. And obviously none of those players have been declared officially available yet. Only Indiana has said it is considering a rebuild, but Brogdon is not one of the names who has been mentioned as being on the trade block.

The Celtics should look to augment the roster. My favorite idea to date comes from Michael Pina of Sports Illustrated, who suggested trading Dennis Schroder, Juancho Hernangomez and one of Aaron Nesmith/Romeo Langford for Norman Powell. But we still have at least a month’s worth of games to play before most teams sort themselves into buyers and sellers, so before we look at external fixes, there are two very simple internal fixes the team can make.

First, they need to run more of the offense through Robert Williams III. When Williams shot .706, .727, and .721 from the field in his first three seasons, there was reason to be skeptical. Across those three seasons, he only played 113 games and averaged less than 15 minutes per game. Could he do it over a full season and with a larger workload? So far, the answer is yes. He’s averaging 28.2 minutes per game this season, and is shooting better than ever — .725 from the field. Of the 2,539 players who have played in at least 100 NBA games, Williams’s career .724 FG% ranks first overall. First, as in best. As in, no one has ever shot as good as Robert Williams III. And yet, Williams is only taking 6.0 shots per game, good for just seventh on the team. Why? You’ve got me.

It’s not just that Williams isn’t shooting, it’s also that he’s not very involved in the offense. Per Second Spectrum stats, the majority of quality starting NBA centers receive 35 or more passes per game. Many receive 40 or more. Williams though, receives only 18.6 passes per game, fewer than backups like New Orleans’ Willy Hernangomez and Toronto’s Khem Birch. What’s more, many of those passes are simply dribble hand-offs that he hands right back off to someone else. Williams has proven to be an adept passer, but the Celtics are not giving him the chance to show it.

Positioning Williams between the free throw line and top of the key and running more of the offense through him there would open up options for the offense and would help combat zone defenses like what Minnesota played on Monday. Certainly, there would be more opportunities for pick and rolls, and would give Williams more opportunities for spot-up mid-range jumpers. He hasn’t taken very many of them, but this season he is shooting .568 from 3-10 ft. from the hoop. Will those percentages drop if he takes more shots? Perhaps. But the Celtics need to give him the opportunity. Him being given the chance to show he’s a weapon from that distance will make it harder to sag on him during pick and rolls. If he can establish a presence in the middle of the floor and become a legitimate third option on offense, he will take a lot of pressure off Tatum, Brown and Smart.

The second thing the Celtics need to do is play Al Horford less. Horford is 35 years old, and for a player his age, he has certainly been productive. He has averaged 12.4 points and 7.9 rebounds per game, and his overall plus/minus is a scratch 0.0. Overall, he has 44.4/29.6/85.0 shooting percentages. But the fourth quarter has told a much different story. In the fourth quarter, his shooting percentages drop to 34.2/13.6/78.9. Yes, you read that correctly – in the fourth quarter, Horford is shooting just 13.6 percent from three-point land.

Horford’s fourth quarter plus/minus is also -1.8, worse than every regular on the team save Langford. It is clear both statistically and via the eye test that Horford simply runs out of gas in the fourth. So either he simply doesn’t play in the fourth, or he plays less in the first three quarters. Whether that means playing Williams more or playing small more frequently is a matter for debate, but the Celtics have to find a way to keep Horford fresh. If he is already tired in the fourth quarter in December, how is he going to fare in April or May?

The solution is simply to not start Horford. Starting Grant Williams alongside Tatum, Brown, Smart and Robert Williams III will not only keep Horford fresher, but will also help spread the floor. Grant Williams is shooting far better from downtown — .466 on three-point attempts compared to .310 for Horford. And if more of the offense flows through the center position in the middle of the floor, it will give Horford the chance to better impact the game when he does come in. Keeping him out by the three-point line isn’t as impactful when he isn’t hitting those shots as regularly (his .310 three-point percentage is easily his worst since he started regularly shooting threes in the 2015-2016 season), and anecdotally, defenders are sagging off of him, making it harder for the offense to function well.

The Celtics roster is definitely far from perfect, and it will be open season on all of their decisions until they can win four games in a row, something they haven’t done yet this season (they did three times last season). But between now and February’s trade deadline, there are fixes available. Running more of the offense through Robert Williams III and developing him as a third option, and playing Al Horford less to keep him fresh and give the team’s other young players more of an opportunity to shine are fixes that can have an immediate impact, and it’s time the Celtics made them.