OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – As the omicron variant is spreading across the country, one local health expert fears we’re not getting a clear picture of its impact on Oklahoma.

“I think we need to identify that we’ve had a failure and we need to fix it,” said Dr. George Monks, with the Oklahoma State Medical Association. “Oklahomans deserve better.”

Monks is constantly going over the state’s COVID-19 numbers and tests for variants of concern and that’s where he became concerned, finding a difference in numbers reported.

“The State of Oklahoma is saying we’ve done 11,198 tests, yet the CDC is showing we’ve only done 6,880,” Monks said. “We were the last state in the nation to identify the alpha variant and we were the next to last state in the nation to identify omicron so something is not working.”

Monks believes the discrepancy is actually larger because the CDC number represents data from all labs, not just the state health lab, impacting the information Oklahomans get and when.

“The CDC put out information that in our region on December 20th, 92% of cases were omicron and yet the Oklahoma Pandemic Center still hasn’t found a single case of omicron,” said Monks. “The first case was identified by an outside lab. Which makes me think there’s no variant testing taking place at the Oklahoma Pandemic Center testing facility.”

Monks believes most new cases of COVID-19 now in Oklahoma are likely omicron.

He says identifying these variants can have a major impact on your treatment should you get a positive test.

“There’s only one monoclonal antibody that works against omicron so we’ve actually had to shift from the other monoclonal antibody treatments to the other one for our treatment,” Monks said.

We’ve reached out to the Oklahoma State Department of Health for comment but have yet to hear back.