Nothing new to report. The 2022 winter wave of COVID-19 remains a dud. We had a little blip in cases (here and in Canada) following U.S. Thanksgiving. But that’s it. No hotspots, no strong trends. Just an annoyingly high background level of daily new cases.
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 12/17/2022, 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
Swamped Hospitals Fear ER Emergency
You’re surely been seeing headlines like that. But that particular headline above is from 2009.
With all the press coverage of hospitals being crowded due to flu and RSV, you might get the impression that this is some new, unique post-COVID phenomenon.
So I decided to do the obvious thing and see what the press coverage looked like during the swine flu epidemic of 2009-2010. That was, prior to this year, just about the worst flu year on record, barring the Spanish Flu.
And, sure enough: Google flu stressed hospitals, restricting articles to the 2009-2010 flu season, you find lots of press coverage that looks more-or-less identical to what we’re seeing this year.
Source: Google search.
The takeaway is that we are having a bad flu season, but that hospitals crowded with flu patients is not something unique to this flu season. I get the vague impression that hospital crowding may be worse this year than it was in 2009. But it’s also true that we have both a higher population, and somewhat fewer hospital beds, than we did in 2009.
