Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are on the rise in most US states, the first increase in prevalence since the peak of the Omicron surge in January.
Reports of new cases were mostly flat in the United States in early April, but as the month draws to a close, they are increasing in all but three states, signaling an increasingly widespread wave across the globe. nationwide scope.
“Most cases are relatively mild,” said Dr. Eric S. Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Health Security.
The recent increase was once concentrated in the Northeast, but the effects of the disease are highly contagious B.2 sub-variable growing geographically more diverse. In the past two weeks, cases have more than doubled in states from West Virginia to Utah.
Hospitalization rates are also on the rise nationally, after plummeting earlier this month to their lowest levels since March 2020. More than 30 states and territories have seen their hospitalization rates increased over the past two weeks, and in much of the Northeast, the number of people hospitalized with coronavirus has increased from mid-month to 40% or more.
“It’s not over yet,” Dr. Toner said in an interview on Friday. “It could be a mistake to relax all of our protections so quickly.”
However, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that more than 60 percent of Americans had been infected with the coronavirus at least once, suggesting the belief that the modest effects of this increase may reflect growing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations.
The number of new cases announced each day in the United States – about 55,000 – remains at its lowest level since last summer and hospital admissions, despite a recent increase, are still near any point low. during the pandemic.
Case numbers have increasingly become an unreliable metric for gauging the true toll of the virus, as Americans increasingly turn to unreported at-home tests. That has led some officials to put more emphasis on hospitalization rates as a measure of the virus’s true impact.
“What we don’t see is a lot of stress on hospitals, and that’s very encouraging,” Dr. Toner said.
Fewer than 400 coronavirus deaths are reported each day in the US, lowest daily average since before the Omicron variant took hold late last fall. The death toll has dropped by more than 20 percent in the past two weeks. However, in the past, mortality trends have lagged behind cases and hospital admissions by week because of the time it took for patients to become critically ill and the time it took to complete and submit death records. death.
The current hot spot of the country is in the heart of New Yorkwhere nearly all counties have “high” community levels of coronavirus, According to CDC The region includes cities such as Binghamton, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica.
“It is clear that Covid is here, and will be here for a while,” Dr. Toner said. “Some degree of caution is wise if a person is at high risk and in a crowded place. Doing things like wearing a mask still makes a lot of sense.”
