The daily new COVID-19 case count remains at 39 per 100K population. But hospitalizations are now over 6200 a day, per the US CDC.
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 7/23/2022, 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
I guess it’s worth noting that the U.S. average is steady because new case counts are steady all across the country. So this isn’t one of those temporary pauses, where increase and decreasing rates just happen to cancel for a while. This has the appearance of having reached some equilibrium rate across most of the country.
But here’s the odd thing that I keep harping on. Deaths are up slightly, at around 350 per day. And new hospitalizations are now almost twice where they were two months ago, despite more-or-less no change in new cases.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 7/23/2022
In prior posts I established that this is across-the-board, occurring in many states. And that it’s primarily due to increased hospitalizations of the elderly, those age 70 and up.
Beyond that, I can’t explain how hospitalizations can nearly double, but deaths hardly changed. Generally — both for COVID-19 and most other diseases — those move in lockstep. E.g., most of the elderly who die from pneumonia each year are sick enough, at some point, to be hospitalized prior to death.
Let’s take a peek internationally, to the extent that’s easy to do. Just the usual suspects, further constrained to the subset that have hospitalization data reported. This is persons currently in the hospital, not daily new admissions, but it will have to do.
Source: Our world in data.
I’m not sure that clarifies much. Great Britain is showing an even larger increase in persons in the hospital than we are. By contrast, neither Canada nor Australia is showing much of an increase.
So this remains a mystery. In the U.S., this is happening across the states, and it’s being driven by admissions for the over-70 population. That’s about as far as I can take it until CDC data on (e.g.) hospitalization by vaccination status catch up to the end of July.
