If her coronavirus test came back positive, Janet Schaffer knew she risked spending Christmas in the basement.

       With less than a week to go until the holiday, the 72-year-old joined a throng of people outside a testing clinic the size of a storage shed in Arlington. Schaffer had decided to get swabbed on the drive from her home in Beaufort, S.C., to New Jersey, where her three grandchildren live. While the older kids were vaccinated, the youngest was not. And so on Sunday morning, Schaffer finished her test and hoped for a negative result.

       Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight

       “We’re all traumatized from last year,” she said. “We thought we were over this. It’s very scary — scary for the old, scary for the young. I’m angry we’re at this point.”

       In line with her at Courthouse Plaza was a 25-year-old graduate student with a plane ticket home to Ghana for the first time in two years, a 38-year-old father of two whose youngest daughter wasn’t yet vaccinated, and a new schoolteacher concerned about exposure from her students. They — like so many across the region — were struggling to make informed decisions ahead of Christmas and New Year’s.

       Advertisement

       Story continues below advertisement

       Warning calls from hospitals and spiking infections in the greater Washington region have driven demand for testing — and caused mounting frustration among leaders about what to do at such a critical stage in the pandemic, amid the spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant and continued vaccine resistance.

       “There’s this tension of people wanting to celebrate the holidays but wanting to do it safely as they see the number of covid hospitalizations increase,” said Anne Arundel County health officer Nilesh Kalyanaraman. “We’re seeing that anxiety.”

       On Friday, D.C. reported the highest single-day total of new coronavirus cases since March 2020: 844. On Saturday, the Maryland Department of Health reported that 1,257 people had been hospitalized with the virus — more than double the rate of 581 people this time last month — causing at least one hospital to reach capacity.

       In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said that he was expecting the “worst surge we’ve seen in our hospitals throughout the entire crisis” in the next three to five weeks — but that he wasn’t planning to impose new restrictions.

       Advertisement

       Story continues below advertisement

       “We’ve got hospitalizations up 150 percent over the past two weeks and we’re taking steps to try to provide more support for our hospitals,” he said. “We’re not anticipating any lockdowns at all. We’re not considering that.”

       However, Maryland has not released data on case rates in more than two weeks, ever since its data tracking system was brought down by a cyberattack. Without that data, state health officials cannot say by how much infections are surging. Hogan downplayed the attack last week, assuring the public that it had not been as intrusive as initially feared.

       But the lack of information has left Karen Cooper, 68, in the lurch. Since the start of the pandemic, she and her husband have religiously consulted the numbers for new infections and death rates in Montgomery County, where they live, as a guide to their behavior. When case rates surged, they arranged for curbside pickup for their groceries; when the rates plunged, they let themselves eat indoors a restaurants.

       Advertisement

       Story continues below advertisement

       “I just think this is inexcusable,” Cooper added about the length of the data outage. “It’s unbelievable.”

       Cooper, who lives in Silver Spring, said both she and her husband have received their booster shots, but without knowing the level of transmission in Montgomery, they’re unsure of how to organize their lives. Among their worries is a 2-year-old grandson, who is too young to be vaccinated.

       Officials in Montgomery, Maryland’s most populous jurisdiction, have also been outspoken this week in their criticism of the state’s data outage.

       “I can think of no more critical moment to understand the dynamics of spread than right now,” assistant chief administrative officer Earl Stoddard said Friday.

       Story continues below advertisement

       Andy Owens, a spokesman for the health department, said Friday that employees were “working around-the-clock” to bring the system back online but did not provide details on when it might come back online.

       Advertisement

       In Prince George’s County, Monica Goldson, the school system’s chief executive, also described a “stark rise” in cases of students and staff infected with covid-19. Two weeks ago, the district’s two-day total was fewer than 100 cases. But last week, Goldson said, the district saw 155 cases in one day. So she decided to do something about it, switching from in-person classes to virtual learning until mid-January.

       During his appearance on Fox, Hogan called the decision “outrageous and wrong” in a district where students had struggled with distanced learning.

       Story continues below advertisement

       “We’re going to make it very clear that we think it’s a mistake,” Hogan said Sunday. “We all want to keep our kids safe, but we’ve got protocols in place.”

       Hogan wasn’t asked during his appearance about the blackout or when case data may become available, a metric that would show how fast the virus is spreading through the community.

       Advertisement

       “The main thing that we have focused on from the very beginning for nearly two years now has been hospitalizations and deaths,” Hogan said. “It’s not just about case rates and positivity rates, it’s about hospitalizations, keeping people safe.”

       That’s left Zoe Vallabha, 38, considering safety on her own. When looking for preschools for her two-year-old daughter, she opted for one with small class sizes that had kids eat outdoors as a covid-19 safety precaution. It was a “good fit” for her family, Vallabha said. But recently, she decided to stop bringing her daughter to the school, taking her out one week before it was due to go on break for the holidays.

       Story continues below advertisement

       “There’s a lot of reason to be cautious right now,” said Vallabha, who lives in Rockville.

       More than 82 percent of Montgomery residents are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control, marking the highest vaccination rate in the D.C. region. But because children under five still aren’t eligible for the shots, Vallabha said she worries about her daughter catching the virus and potentially suffering the effects of “long covid,” especially if case rates continue to rise as much as they have in recent weeks.

       Vallabha said she was “in lockdown mood again.”