Covid hospitalizations are at their lowest levels since the U.S. began keeping records at the start of the pandemic, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Average hospitalizations fell to 16,760, lower than the previous low of 16,808, set before the delta wave in June 2021. Hospitalization figures from the past few days could change as hospitals finalize numbers.
Since March 2020, when HHS began recording hospitalizations, there have been as many as 159,000 hospitalized in a day with Covid, a peak set Jan. 20 during the omicron surge. On average the country has reported 63,000 hospitalizations a day.
In the past two weeks, hospitalizations have fallen 32 percent, from an average of 24,595 to 16,760.
This comes in a month in which President Joe Biden declared that “Covid-19 need no longer control our lives” in his State of the Union address.
Covid cases are declining as well, down to an average of 32,000 new cases a day, a 7 percent fall in the last two weeks. At the same time, the BA.2 subvariant of omicron became the dominant variant in the U.S. this week, and cases have started to slowly rise in the Northeast. It’s unclear whether BA.2 will cause a wave, though some experts remain optimistic that it won’t.
Vaccinations, which have slowed to a trickle, could soon be opened to children younger than 5, the last vaccination-ineligible group in the U.S.
Five states set records Thursday for fewest average Covid hospitalizations: Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Nevada and Wyoming. Wyoming reported nine people hospitalized, a rate of close to 1 hospitalization per 100,000 residents, the lowest among states.
The U.S. Virgin Islands reported the lowest rate among all jurisdictions, with fewer than 1 person per 100,000 residents hospitalized.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, said that new antivirals were keeping more infected people from seeking treatment during the omicron era.
“Those interventions … clearly work well to keep people out of the hospital,” he said during a White House briefing last week.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
