A member of the Salt Lake County Health Department who tests for COVID-19 walks past a line outside the Salt Lake County Health Department on Tuesday. The number of new COVID-19 cases hit a record this week, topping those in January.
Rick Bowmer / AP
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Rick Bowmer / AP
A member of the Salt Lake County Health Department who tests for COVID-19 walks past a line outside the Salt Lake County Health Department on Tuesday. The number of new COVID-19 cases hit a record this week, topping those in January.
Rick Bowmer / AP
The omicron variant is spreading rapidly across the country, but hospitalization and death rates remain relatively low.
The average number of COVID-19 cases in seven days is 280,000 this week, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University tracker. That is a record number of new cases in the country; The last time the number of cases peaked was in January of this year.
Public health officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Director of the Rochelle Walensky Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the new variant appears to be less severe than previous ones, but still emphasize the need required to follow public health protocols such as vaccinations and wearing a mask to limit the spread of the virus.
Data from the White House provided at Wednesday’s briefing showed the seven-day average of hospitalizations was about 9,000 a day – a 14% increase in hospitalizations from last week, but a huge disparity. large compared to the 60% increase among cases in the same time frame. The seven-day average COVID-19 death rate has fallen from last week, at about 1,100 deaths per day.
Officials say this is in part because omicrons are less likely to cause severe symptoms for those vaccinated, and especially for motivated people.
Fauci said another reason for the large gap between the increase in hospitalizations and cases is the fact that hospitalizations tend to lag behind recorded cases. However, “all signs point to milder disease with omicron than delta,” he said.
Fauci also cites a new study out of South Africa that shows that hospitalizations due to omicron waves make up 4.5% of cases compared with 21.3% with other variants. The number of patients requiring oxygen in the hospital with the omicron variant was more than half that of patients with the earlier variant. And hospital stay was about 4 days with the omicron variant, compared with a median of 8.8 days with previous episodes.
Although the severity of the omicron variant appears to be lower, Fauci emphasizes that people need to be vaccinated and stay healthy.
“The accelerator offers that level of protection,” he said. “The accelerator is very important.”
