The US set a new COVID-19 hospitalization record on Monday, exceeding 140,000 patients for the first time since the start of the Pandemic.
According to the New York Times, the previous hospitalization peak was in January of 2021. A mass vaccine effort kicked in several months later to protect recipients from the majority of severe disease.
142,388 Americans were hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday.
The news of a new U.S. hospitalization record may surprise Americans who have heard that the Omicron variant is less likely to sicken those who catch it.
New York University epidemiologist Céline Gounder recently told New York magazine that people have fixated on the idea that it is mild. Mild means relatively mild for the individual who isinfecting. It doesn't mean mild at a population level.
The new U.S. hospitalization numbers suggest that a surge can be anything but mild if enough people are affected.
Gounder and others have pointed out that the problem is twofold.
The number of new daily cases is three times higher than ever before, and there is a ton of virus circulating right now. The Fred Hutchinson institute in Seattle has calculated that Omicron is infecting more than 3 million Americans each day.
A COVID patient is being treated at Western Reserve Hospital. Shannon Stapleton is a reporter for the Associated Press.
This once unthinkable level of spread guarantees that Omicron will find as many people at increased risk of hospitalization as possible, including the entirely unvaccinated, the vaccine but unboosted, and especially seniors who are not boosted.
Almost all of them are unvaccinated or undervaccinated, and Omicron is sending them to the hospital.
If a lot of people get sick, it will be very hard for the health care system to care for them.
Some of the news about U.S. hospitalizations is positive. The data shows that fewer patients are on a ventilator and shorter hospital stays in comparison to the past waves, which is consistent with higher population immunity and a variant that doesn't latch onto lung cells as well as its predecessors. According to data from various states, a significant fraction of COVID-19 patients tested positive for Omicron after being admitted for another ailment.
If the hospital doesn't have beds or providers needed to care for its patients, entering the hospital with Covid versus FOR Covid isn't a relevant distinction. Even to providers, the distinction isn't always clear. It doesn't matter very much.
Every Covid + patient needs the same isolation to protect them from other patients. They use the same PPE. They all represent a risk to providers. They all need the same space in a bed. That is in short supply.
Spencer wrote an article for the New York Times titled, "As an E.R. Doctor, I Fear Health Care Collapse More Than Omicron."
All of the unvaccinated patients, who are short of breath and need oxygen, are the classic example of Covid-19 patients, who were rendered too weak to get out of bed.
Medical workers confer in the intensive care unit at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center.
The Omicron surge is real and even if Omicron is mild, it's not mild. It causes severe disease half as often as Delta, but it also causes more people to get sick.
The data from early U.S. Omicron hot spots is starting to show this. There are more Chicagoans in the intensive care unit or on ventilators today than there were a year ago.
In New York City and Washington, D.C., hospitalizations have topped last winter's highs.
John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist for the Financial Times, reported last Tuesday that the number of patients on ventilators has barely risen despite steep rises in cases and patients. The number of people in London intensive care units has fallen in recent weeks, and is not following the same path as last winter.
The hope was that the pattern would repeat itself in the U.S. because of Omicron's mildness. But it has not. The number of U.S. COVID patients in the intensive care unit was twice as high as the number of U.K. COVID patients. The disparity is more than five times higher today. The U.S. curve has gone up 100 percent, but it is 21 percent lower than it was last winter.
Why? Scott Gottlieb thinks that lower U.S. vax/booster rates may be to blame.
Gottlieb said that the US isn't as strong as the UK due to lower U.S. vax/booster rates. The wrangling over boosters may have made consumers confused.
The boosted rate is less than half as high as in the U.K., but America's two-dose vaccination rate is somewhat lower. The U.K. data shows that three vaccine doses prevent 88 percent of Omicron hospitalizations.
The intensive care unit at the medical center. Joseph Prezioso is a photographer.
It's not clear what this means for the U.S. Omicron deaths. The trajectory of deaths in New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C. is tracked closely by the New York Times. It typically takes a terminal COVID patient about a year to die from the disease.
While those cities have suffered fewer deaths per case so far this winter than they did last, they are also reporting more cases now than they did. The absolute number of deaths may go up this winter because the worst of those cases go through the overburdened hospital system.
The Delta variant was already spurring its own wave in the Northeast when Omicron took hold. Omicron may be looking worse than it is because of the Delta cases.
In the next few weeks, Omicron will spread from cities like New York, where 74 percent of the population is fully vaccined, to places like Mississippi, where just 49 percent of the population is fully vaccine protected.
Texas, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama are all low-vax states where Omicron is spreading the fastest.
Anne Sosin, a public health researcher at Dartmouth College, predicted Monday that Omicron will overwhelm already strained hospitals, increase rural deaths from COVID and further restrict access to non-COVID care as it advances into less vaccine-free rural regions.
In Maryland, 20 percent of hospitals are reporting staff shortages, and the dashboard of the COVID-19 Hospital Capacity Circuit Breaker shows that every single county has reached or exceeded its hospital capacity.
One physician wrote to the dashboard's creator that the situation in Maryland was horrendous. The state has been out for two weeks. Hospitals are operating under a crisis standard of care. Baltimore County started transporting people in fire trucks last week because of the increased taxes on ambulance services. This is not normal and absurd. There are reports of people waiting for the fire fighters to leave before the ambulance arrives. They wait hours for a bed when they get to the hospital. The transfer centers laugh when you call. It's mind- incomprehensible to me that this has not been a national story.
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