OHSU medical students Gina Calco and Victoria Orfaly discuss why they helped create a new skin cancer education campaign for high school students and share the importance of educating the next generation about prevention of melanoma.

Renee Edwards, M.D.: "Our health care workers have been working extraordinarily hard," and to get medical operations back on track, the community has to step up: "We know how to control the spread of this disease."

“For some of these more medically complicated kids, it can be a 24-hour job taking care of them at home,” OHSU Dr. Derek Lam says, adding of the caregivers: “I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they get any sleep at night.”

As omicron cases soar, and health systems prepare for a record hospitalization peak, Marcel Curlin, M.D., says: “It’s still the same virus. It’s a different variant, but it’s still COVID. It still spreads in the same way that it does, causes the same kinds of problems that it has been. The main steps to avoid getting infected and avoid harm to your family, close contacts, loved ones is still the same as it was."

Dr. Peter Graven, director of the Oregon Health and Science University Office of Advanced Analytics, said the forecast for COVID hospitalizations in the omicron wave remains essentially unchanged from a week ago: a predicted peak of about 1,650 hospitalizations, likely arriving by the end of January.

While we are in the middle of this omicron-fueled surge, more people are testing positive for COVID-19. So, what do you do if it happens to you? Dr. Dawn Nolt, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the Oregon Health and Science University shares more.

Debbie Lamberger says staffing issues have prevented OHSU from expanding its drive-through, appointment-only community testing site at the Portland Expo Center.

An OHSU study led by Fikadu Tafesse, Ph.D., and Marcel Curlin, M.D., found breakthrough infections greatly enhance immune response to variants of the virus that causes.

But the severity of omicron will be largely offset by the sheer number of people who will be infected. "That doesn't help with the kind of all-at-once impact on hospital capacity that we're going to see here, and hopefully prevent," said Peter Graven, the chief medical forecaster for Oregon Health & Science University.