NEW YORK – New York State reported 130 new COVID deaths Thursday, the highest number in a single day since the launch of the mass vaccination, and more than 11,000 hospital admissions, the highest total since the peak of the health crisis in spring 2020.
Governor Kathy Hochul reported 84,202 new COVID cases in the past day, which is 1,274 cases less than the single-day record of 85,476 the governor announced on the first day of the new year.
More than one in five COVID tests in New York are testing positive these days, and the city has seen positivity rates approaching one in three tests on occasion over the past month. As staggering as the daily case reports have become, experts say infections alone, which have been shown to be milder when Omicron versus delta are compared, are not their primary concern.
The top concerns, elected officials, experts and public health leaders agree, are COVID hospitalization and death rates. Those critical indicators also show large increases over the past six weeks, in addition to a brief Christmas recession. New York City’s moving average for hospitalizations has risen 62% from its four-week averages and has grown nearly ninefold since Dec. 1.
The five counties now account for more than half of the more than 11,000 hospitalized COVID patients statewide. Totals for both the state and the city are currently the highest since late April 2020, the worst of the early pandemic.
Still, hospitalizations don’t tell the whole story. Some cases in the official count involve COVID-19 infections that weren’t what put patients in the hospital in the first place. Many have underlying conditions that exacerbate the severity of their COVID-related illnesses. According to Dr. Fritz François, chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Health, 65% of patients admitted to that system with COVID recently were hospitalized primarily for another cause and found to have the virus.
Manhattan emergency room physician Dr. Craig Spencer, who has been documenting his experiences in recent weeks, is also finding similar trends. As he explained on Twitter earlier this week, this current wave of COVID is “making people sick in a different way.”
“Today it seemed like everyone had COVID … And yes, like before, there were some really short of breath and in need of oxygen. But for most, COVID seemed to knock down a delicate balance of an underlying disease,” Spencer wrote. .
Death rates have fortunately been below the 800 New Yorkers who died a day in April 2020, when hospitalizations were so high. Statewide, they peaked on April 12 of that year, with 12,184 COVID patients admitted. It’s highly plausible, given the latest trends, the state could top that in the next few weeks.
New York City hospital officials, however, say the situation is not dire at this time. Generally, patients are not as sick as they used to be in the pandemic. Of the patients currently hospitalized in New York City, about 630 are in the ICU. That’s the highest total since early March 2021, five times less than the April 2020 figures.
“We are not even in the middle of what we were in April 2020,” said Dr. David Battinelli, chief physician at Northwell Health, New York State’s largest hospital system.
Deaths are likely to rise as a default consequence of rising hospitalization rates, but the milder nature of Ómicron, coupled with the power of vaccines to prevent serious illness and death, should mitigate the increases.
New York State has now reported two days of triple-digit deaths this week. Both are the first triple-digit tolls since the large-scale vaccination launch. The first recent high in deaths came on Monday, when the state reported 103 deaths. It was the same day that state hospitalizations exceeded rising levels since January 2021.
New York City accounted for about 48% of the 130 deaths reported by the state on Thursday. Brooklyn has been hit the hardest of late in that regard, accounting for 24 of the city’s 62 new COVID deaths as reported by the state last day, but deaths remain well above recent Queens averages (16 on Thursday ), the Bronx (11) and Manhattan (7) as well.
Nonprofit hospitals and clinics will receive 138 million to boost their efforts.
Overall, the increases in city death rates amid this Omicron wave have been substantially less than the increases in the other core metrics. As of Thursday’s data, the moving average of deaths for the past seven days increased 35% from the moving averages of the previous four weeks. The case lines have had a strong upward trend, although the latest figures indicate that it could stabilize. It will likely take an extra week or two to determine if this is a vacation issue or a positive trend.
Could there be a rapid decline rather than a slow decline in cases, given the spread of vaccines in the city and improved protocols to begin in 2022? That is hope, although time will tell if that hope is translated into reality.
South Africa, where the variant first emerged in early November (although it was probably spreading before being detected), says its omicron peak appears to have passed without major increases in COVID deaths, which experts say is a promising news.
Ultimately, officials say the vaccines will quell the increases in hospitalizations and deaths associated with the omicron wave. That is why they urge calm at this time, and promote COVID vaccines and boosters for those who must receive them. That’s especially true for children, who have seen COVID hospitalizations skyrocket to record highs in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut of late.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul acknowledged that people are exhausted by the pandemic, but pleaded with them to stay up-to-date with precautions and get vaccinated as the state pushes to overcome this winter surge without making it worse.
“Let us continue to use the tools that will protect ourselves, our children and our vulnerable loved ones from becoming seriously ill or hospitalized with COVID,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “Please get fully vaccinated, get the booster dose, wear a well-fitting non-cloth mask, and be careful when you are inside.”
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