The U.S. is now at 34 new cases per 100K per day, up from a revised 33 yesterday, and up 16% in the last seven days.
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 6/30/2022, 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
Daily new COVID hospitalizations continue to inch up, and are now just shy of 5000 per day.
That doesn’t sound like a big number, does it? But that’s about 5% of all daily U.S. non-maternity hospital admissions. One-in-twenty. And at that rate, there will be about 1.8 million COVID-19 admissions per year. Which would place it like so, among the top reasons for non-maternal hospital admissions in the U.S.:
So, while this has faded from the public’s attention, it hasn’t actually faded in terms of its medical importance. And, for some unknown reason, hospitalizations continue to climb despite official case counts that have been more-or-less stable for the past month and a half.
Is 5000 hospitalizations a day – 1.8 million a year — our new normal?
Just as a point of reference, there are about 350,000 flu hospitalizations in a typical flu season. Per the CDC, via Wikipedia:
A while back, I kept trying to figure out the point at which COVID-19 is no more burdensome than typical seasonal flu. If this keeps up, the answer is never. At 5000 hospitalizations a day — when it isn’t even the peak of the season — this will never be as harmless as typical seasonal flu.
So in terms of that COVID-versus-flu comparison, COVID-19 remains off-the-charts in terms of total hospitalizations.
Maybe we need to toss that concept into the dustbin, along with herd immunity for COVID, and a low, ignorable level of endemic COVID.
