By KATH­LEEN FOODY | AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

CHICA­GO (AP) — More than a year af­ter the vac­cine was rolled out, new cas­es of COVID-19 in the U.S. have soared to the high­est lev­el on record at over 265,000 per day on av­er­age, a surge dri­ven large­ly by the high­ly con­ta­gious omi­cron vari­ant.

The pre­vi­ous mark was 250,000 cas­es per day, set in mid-Jan­u­ary, ac­cord­ing to da­ta kept by Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty.

The fast-spread­ing mu­tant ver­sion of the virus has cast a pall over Christ­mas and New Year’s, forc­ing com­mu­ni­ties to scale back or call off their fes­tiv­i­ties just weeks af­ter it seemed as if Amer­i­cans were about to en­joy an al­most nor­mal hol­i­day sea­son. Thou­sands of flights have been can­celled amid staffing short­ages blamed on the virus.

The num­ber of Amer­i­cans now in the hos­pi­tal with COVID-19 is run­ning at around 60,000, or about half the fig­ure seen in Jan­u­ary, the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion re­port­ed.

While hos­pi­tal­iza­tions some­times lag be­hind case num­bers, the fig­ures may in­di­cate omi­cron is not mak­ing peo­ple as se­vere­ly ill as pre­vi­ous ver­sions, as many ex­perts sus­pect.

COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have climbed over the past two weeks from an av­er­age of 1,200 per day to around 1,500.

Sev­er­al Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, in­clud­ing France, Greece, Britain and Spain, al­so re­port­ed record case counts this week, prompt­ing a ban on mu­sic at New Year’s cel­e­bra­tions in Greece and a re­newed push to en­cour­age vac­ci­na­tion by French au­thor­i­ties.