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The number of Americans in hospitals with COVID-19 exceeded the peak seen last winter over the weekend, highlighting the speed with which the highly transmissible omicron variant is spreading.
There were 142,388 people in U.S. hospitals on Sunday, the New York Times reported, citing government data. That is more than the 142,315 that were counted on Jan. 14 of 2021.
The seven-day average for hospitalizations stood at 135,559 on Monday, according to a New York Times tracker, up 83% from two weeks ago. However, that is still well below the rate at which new cases are trending at 737,415 a day, up 203% from two weeks ago.
COVID-19 deaths are averaging 1,653 a day, up 36% from two weeks ago. Deaths lag hospitalizations and new cases and data is still showing that omicron is less lethal than earlier variants.
Case numbers are likely undercounted because many people are testing at home and their positive diagnoses are not being recorded. But the sharp spike shows the virus is spreading fast, creating many breakthrough cases in people who have been vaccinated and even boosted, and has not yet peaked.
Hospitals in some areas are filling fast and U.S. companies are reporting staffing issues due to illness with omicron in increasing numbers.
See: Shake Shack expects 2021 revenue to beat Street expectations but staffing is taking a hit from COVID
Related: Omicron worsens labor shortage, slows economy — and could boost inflation
The head of the World Health Organization for Europe warned on Tuesday that more than half of Europeans could be infected with omicron in the next two months, if current infection rates continue. Regional Director Hans Kluge warned that the omicron variant represents a “new west-to-east tidal wave sweeping across” the European region, AFP reported.
The agency’s Europe region includes 53 countries and 50 of those have confirmed omicron cases, he said. And a full 26 of those have reported that more than 1% of their populations are contracting COVID-19 every week as of Jan. 10, with the overall region counting more than 7 million new cases in the first week of the new year alone.
The risk now is that hospitals will be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases and that will cause preventable fatalities.
See: GlaxoSmithKline, Vir shares up as U.S. orders more doses of COVID treatment sotrovimab
Kluge stressed that for now, all data shows that vaccines continue to provide strong protection against serious illness and death, making it more important than ever that unvaccinated people get their shots.
“We still have a virus that’s evolving quite quickly and posing quite new challenges. So we’re certainly not at the point of being able to call it endemic,” WHO senior emergencies officer Catherine Smallwood told reporters.
Other COVID-19 news to know:
• Starting Saturday, private health insurers will be required to cover up to eight home COVID-19 tests per month for people on their plans, the Associated Press reported. Americans will be able to either purchase home testing kits for free under their insurance or submit receipts for the tests for reimbursement, up to the monthly per-person limit.
• Health authorities around the U.S. are increasingly taking the extraordinary step of allowing nurses and other workers infected with the coronavirus to stay on the job if they have mild symptoms or none at all, the AP reported separately. The move is a reaction to the severe hospital staffing shortages and crushing caseloads that the omicron variant is causing.
• Pfizer Inc.
PFE,
is working on a hybrid vaccine that will cover coronavirus variants including omicron, with plans to seek regulatory clearance by March if needed, said the pharmaceutical giant’s chief executive officer Albert Bourla. Bourla made the comments at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference on Monday afternoon, where he discussed the company’s plans and challenges surrounding the highly transmissible omicron variant. An edited transcript of the comments were made available on Pfizer’s website.
• A third Chinese city has locked down its residents because of a COVID-19 outbreak, raising the number confined to their homes in China to about 20 million people, the AP reported. It wasn’t clear how long the lockdown of Anyang city, home to 5.5 million, would last as a notice said it was being done to facilitate mass testing but did not indicate if it would end when the testing is completed. Another 13 million people are locked down in the city of Xi’an and 1.1 million in Yuzhou.
• BioNTech SE
BNTX,
said it has developed a new system with InstaDeep Ltd. that uses a mix of modeling and artificial intelligence to predict high-risk new SARS-CoV-2 variants, based on publicly available virus sequences. The system examines the “fitness” and immune escape qualities of newly identified variants to determine their risk.
Here’s what the numbers say
The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 climbed to 310.6 million Tuesday, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. The death toll climbed above 5.49 million.
The U.S. leads the world with 61.6 million cases and 839,500 fatalities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine tracker is showing that about 208 million people living in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, equal to 62.6% of the population.
Some 75.8 million have received a booster, equal to 36.5% of the fully vaccinated.
