Death and hospitalization rates in the United States due to Covid-19 relatively low despite a spike in Covid-19 cases due to the spread varian Omicron.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said the average daily case rate for the past seven days was up 60% from the previous week to around 240,400 per day. Meanwhile, the average daily hospitalization rate for the same period rose 14% to around 9,000 per day and deaths fell by about 7% to 1,100 per day.
“In a few short weeks, Omicron variants have rapidly increased across the country, and we expect to continue to circulate in the coming weeks. While cases have increased substantially from last week, hospitalizations and deaths remain relatively low now,” Walensky said. quoted from Reuters.
Preliminary US data show Omicron has a lower hospitalization-to-case ratio than the Delta variant, the current top US infectious disease. Anthony Fauci said booster vaccines are very important for protection.
“All indications show the severity of Omicron is lower than Delta. Booster vaccine is very important in dealing with Omicron,” he said.
Both Fauci and Walensky warned that the additional deaths and hospitalizations were likely to be lower than the case data in the past two weeks.
Fauci said it was possible that a second booster injection was needed, but that more complete data could not be known without knowing the durability of the protection offered by the second booster which has not yet been asked.
“Before we start talking about the fourth injection, it will be very important for us to determine the durability of the booster, especially the impact of the third injection of mRNA and the second injection of J&J to prevent severity,” he said.
He said that his party did not yet have information regarding the effectiveness of the booster. However, he suspects additional booster doses may be needed in the future.
The US government plans to provide 500 million antigen tests to help tackle the spike in cases. “The Department of Defense and HHS are executing this at an earlier schedule,” he said.
Disease experts have questioned the CDC’s recent guidelines for halving the isolation period for the asymptomatic coronavirus. They have no protection that could lead to more infections as the United States faces a record spike in cases.
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