The U.S. is now at 9.3 new cases per 100K population per day. That’s just about where we were seven days ago, and it’s a little bit of an uptick from the very lowest rate seen in the past seven days. I don’t want to read too much into that, but cases are now flat-to-up in four of the six regions on the graph below.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 3/24/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page 3may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
If I had to guess, I’d guess that’s the bottom, and that the U.S. is now going to see some increases in case counts.
That’s not locked in. As I noted yesterday, the seasonality of COVID-19 is in our favor. Based on the last couple of years, we should hit the year’s low in the early part of June.
But balanced against that is the continued spread of son–of-Omicron, and the continued decline in mask use and other COVID-19 hygiene.
It’s not worth belaboring it further until we see more.
For such a mild disease, there sure is a high hospitalization rate.
Just for the record, we still appear to have a weirdly high case hospitalization rate. Taking the figures at face value, one out of every 14 people diagnosed with COVID-19 ends up in the hospital. Some of that will plausibly be people hospitalized with COVID (as a secondary diagnosis) not for COVID (as principal diagnosis). But, based on how we’ve tracked hospitalizations all along, that’s still an oddly high case hospitalization rate, given that Omicron is generally thought to produce mild cases.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker. Notes in red are mine.
The U.S. has about 36 million hospital admissions per year. When I do the math, that means that COVID admissions still account for 2 percent of all U.S. hospital admissions.
At the current rate, we’d see about 700,000 COVID-19 admissions per year. So even at our low current new-case rates, on the face of it, COVID-19 is a larger source of U.S. hospital admissions than either heart attacks or strokes.
Source: Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, U.S. DHHS. Notes in red are mine.
For a disease that we’re doing our best to forget exists, and that everybody agrees is not a large cause for concern now, that seems like a hugely disproportionate impact on U.S. hospitalizations and, by inference, hospital costs.
