The U.S. remains at 33 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population, up about 5 percent over the past seven days. By eye, there’s now a pronounced “flat spot” at the end of the U.S. new-cases curve.
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 5/27/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Per the CDC COVID data tracker, deaths have finally topped 300 per day, and hospital admissions stand at about 3600 per day.
I read an article yesterday about how stressed some hospitals are, but it was typical fear journalism. That is, it was a string of cherry-picked anecdotes, with no reference to any objective census or random-sample numbers. (You an always write whatever story you wish as a “human interest” story, just by picking whichever personal stories fit the narrative you are trying to push.)
Looking briefly at the U.S. DHHS unified hospital dataset, the last time any U.S. state had 30% or more of ICU beds occupied by COVID cases was mid-February. Currently the (unweighted, state-level) median fraction of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 cases is 3 percent. Currently the maximum is Delaware, with 8 percent of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 cases, which is plausible given their COVID-19 new case rate of roughly 60 per 100K population per day.
That file contains another measure of hospital stress, which is self-reported critical nursing staff shortages. (I.e., a critical shortage of nursing staff, not a shortage of critical-care nurse.) At the peak of the Omicron (I) wave, about one-in-five hospitals said they had a critical shortage of nursing staff. Since mid-February, that has held steady at about one-in-twenty.
This self-report staffing shortage number varies widely by state, but it does not appear to be a good indicator of COVID-19-induced staffing issues. I think that, in large part, that’s because small rural hospitals always have trouble finding and retaining nursing staff. So that states full of small rural hospitals will tend to report a lot of staffing shortage issues.
So, for example, Vermont currently leads the list, with 58% of Vermont hospitals reporting a staffing shortage as of 5/26/2022. Is that some huge COVID-19-induced issue? No, that just appears to be the norm for Vermont hospitals. That number is roughly unchanged since December 2021 (which is as far back as I cared to track it). The peak of the Omicron (I) wave made it slightly worse, but that’s about the extent of it.
Source: U.S. DHHS unified hospital dataset,
I’m sure I could find anecdotes about hospitals and hospital personnel stressed by the Omicron (II) COVID wave. I’m equally sure that does not mean any significant or systematic stress of state hospital systems under the current COVID-19 case load. Unlike the peaks of past waves, there just aren’t enough COVID-19 admissions to do that.
