The number of people in U.S. hospitals with COVID-19 is at its lowest point since the early days of the pandemic in the spring of 2020.
Hospitalizations have steadily declined since mid-February after the highly transmissible omicron variant struck in late fall 2021. Roughly 16,700 people, on average, were in the hospital with COVID-19 over the past seven days, the lowest weekly average since March 2020, right before the number of patients seeking care exploded, according to a tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University.
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“A reason to celebrate, even if it’s brief,” said Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.
Hospitalizations swelled at the onset of the omicron variant’s destruction beginning late in the fall and finally receded last month. At omicron’s peak in mid-January, roughly 159,000 people were being treated for COVID-19 in the hospital at one time. In fact, hospitalizations due to the omicron variant surpassed previous records during delta’s predominance and in the first few months of the pandemic.
Now, a new omicron variant offshoot, BA.2, is the dominant strain in the United States, having already swept across parts of Europe. BA.2 is known as the “stealth” variant due to a unique genetic makeup that makes it harder to detect with a standard PCR test. The omicron sister strain has also driven the most distinct outbreak in China yet, prompting government officials to impose strict lockdowns on entire cities such as Shanghai, a city of 26 million.
Continued declines in hospitalizations and deaths attributed to COVID-19 suggest the BA.2 subvariant does not cause more severe illness than the original omicron strain.
“This is normal, and we shouldn’t be too concerned about it,” said Shangxin Yang, a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “For those who are not yet boosted, go get boosted. For those who are not vaccinated, go get vaccinated. If we have a very general practice of behavior, we can do just fine.”
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Omicron is thought to cause less severe infection than the delta variant and is quicker to treat. People infected with omicron had a 53% decreased risk of symptomatic hospitalization compared with those infected with delta, as well as a 74% drop in the risk of ICU admission and a 91% reduction in mortality. But the risk of getting omicron was double that of getting delta, landing more people, especially the unvaccinated, in the hospital.
Some hospitalizations attributed to COVID-19 were prompted by incidental positives, meaning patients would be admitted if they go to the hospital for an issue unrelated to the coronavirus but test positive when they arrive. The federal government does not currently differentiate between patients who go to the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms suspecting they’ve been infected and patients who test positive once there.
