Symptoms are on the rise, and with Pennsylvania reporting 17,520 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, the demand for COVID-19 tests is increasing by the day.

Wednesday was the highest reported cases since the pandemic began. The last record was set on Dec. 10, 2020, with 11,628 cases.

St. Luke’s University Health Network officials are encouraging people who believe they have been exposed to COVID-19 but are not symptomatic not to go to one of its hospital emergency departments or urgent care locations for a test to rule out infection.

“Our region is experiencing a surge in demand for testing because of the omicron variant,” said Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, St. Luke’s Senior Vice President of Medical & Academic Affairs and Section Chief Emeritus of Infectious Diseases. “We ask for the public’s thoughtful cooperation to ensure our region’s health care resources are available and accessible in a timely manner to those patients with the greatest need.”

Likewise, people who are symptomatic and have tested positive using an at-home test should not seek a second, confirmatory laboratory test from the network, officials said.

“An at-home test that produces a positive result in a symptomatic individual is considered highly accurate, so a second, laboratory test is not necessary to confirm the diagnosis,” St. Luke’s said in a press release.

Finding those at-home tests is proving challenging, however. Of five pharmacies contacted Wednesday morning, only one, Mauch Chunk Pharmacy in Jim Thorpe, had any in stock.

Mauch Chunk is carrying BinaxNOW self tests, which come two in a package and costs $49.99. Those tests, pharmacy employees said, are flying off the shelves and likely wouldn’t last long.

“The home tests were hard to get to begin with and now we can’t get them at all,” employees at Bechtel’s Pharmacy in Slatington said.

Shafer’s Pharmacy in Tamaqua also reported tests were out of stock with no prediction on when more may become available. First National Pharmacy in Lehighton is working to get tests in stock as well.

Pocono Community Pharmacy does not carry home COVID-19 tests, but does offer rapid testing with results available in about 10 minutes.

Many times, according to Dr. Alex Benjamin, chief infection control and prevention officer for Lehigh Valley Health Network, people are searching desperately for a test so they can make decisions on isolation. Laboratories, he said, are trying to keep up with not only the demand of tests, but getting those tests turned around and resulted in a timely fashion so that people can make decisions about what they need to do.

“People want to know if they should send their kids to school or can they still go over to take care of grandma and grandpa, things like that,” Benjamin said. “If there’s a message to go tell people, I think it is to certainly look aggressively for a home test but ultimately we want people to make the best decisions they can about their care. Having said that, if there was a clear exposure to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 and you start to develop symptoms, the likelihood is that it’s going to be COVID-19 so you should operate with that thinking in mind.”

Influenza cases, Benjamin said, are more prevalent this year than they were in late 2020. LVHN doctors, he added, received a report that showed the network saw 670 cases of the flu in the past week.

“COVID-19 clearly dominated the respiratory viral season last year,” Benjamin said. “But there was also a massive mandate in place, which certainly dampened its transmission throughout the community. We are clearly having an influenza season right now. The numbers in our network have continued to rise week over week. Only maybe a handful of flu patients, however, are hospitalized. Some of them are co-infected with COVID-19.”

As COVID-19 cases increase, health officials continue to advocate for vaccinations.

A post Tuesday on the Lehigh Valley Health Network Facebook page stated, “93% of LVHN’s COVID-19 patients in the intensive care unit are unvaccinated while zero ICU patients have had all three doses of the vaccine.

“Every day, we are seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations and with holiday gatherings, we expect to see these numbers continue to climb in the coming weeks,” the post said.

According to the CDC, as of Dec. 27, 73.9% of Pennsylvanians age 18 and older are fully vaccinated.

Outside of Philadelphia, which is its own vaccine jurisdiction, 279,989 vaccine doses were administered in the past week including 146,007 booster doses and 23,348 pediatric doses administered in the past week. That marks a 31.1% decrease in vaccines administered from previous week, which the state Department of Health largely attributed to the Christmas holiday.

From Dec. 20-26, the daily average number of COVID-19 cases statewide was 9,979. The number of people hospitalized was 0.4 percent lower on Dec. 27 than Dec. 20.