After taking only 72 hours to go from 52 to 53 million COVID cases, it has taken only 48 hours to go from 53 million to 54 million cases. According to Johns Hopkins University there have been 54,286,545 cases resulting in 824,277 deaths representing a mortality rate of 1.5%.
Now there is a case to be made that hospitalization rates are a more meaningful number than the aggregated total of COVID cases. While it has been argued that the Omicron variant is less likely to result in hospitalization than the Delta variant, according to Our World in Data, hospitalizations have more than doubled since the first week of November from a little over 40,000 to 84,000. Hospitalizations for COVID peaked in the U.S. in early January 2021 during the final weeks of the Trump Administration at just under 130,000.
Even if omicron results in fewer hospitalizations we could still surpass the peak of a year ago. Let's say that 1% of every million cases results in hospitalizations. That's 10,000 hospitalizations. At the rate we're going we will soon add 1 million new COVID cases a day. I have a bad feeling that even with a milder COVID variant January 2022 could be the roughest month yet for hospitalizations especially with a shortage of health care workers.
In a few months time, the sheer number of Omicron cases could turn the pandemic into an endemic but there will be a lot more pain to come. The new year will not start as a happy one.
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