Medical staff treat coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patient Frank Clark in his room on an isolated medical unit floor at Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, January 5, 2022.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
People hospitalized with Covid-19 have doubled since early May as the even more transmissible omicron BA.5 subvariant has caused another wave of infection across the country, U.S. health officials said Tuesday.
But deaths from Covid still remain relatively low given the number of infections right now, the officials said. Dr. Ashish Jha, who coordinates the Biden administration’s Covid response, said deaths from the virus are not increasing at the same rate they once did due to the availability of vaccines and the antiviral treatment Paxlovid.
“Even in the face of BA.5, the tools we have continue to work. We are at a point in the pandemic where most Covid-19 deaths are preventable,” Jha told reporters during a pandemic update Tuesday. But he said the number of deaths still remains unacceptably high given the fact that the U.S. has vaccines and treatments to prevent the worst outcomes.
More than 16,600 total patients were hospitalized with Covid across the U.S. as of Saturday, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently, an average of more than 5,000 people have been admitted to the hospital with Covid every day compared with an average of more than 2,000 daily admissions for the week ended May 1, according to the CDC.
The U.S. is currently reporting an average of nearly 104,000 Covid infections per day as of Sunday which is almost double the number of reported cases at the start of May, according to the data. White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the reported infections are clearly an undercount because many people are using at-home tests that aren’t reflected in the data. Fauci said the real number of cases might be anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 new infections a day.
Deaths from the virus have remained relatively low at about 280 fatalities a day on average as of Sunday, according to CDC data. At the height of the winter omicron wave, an average of nearly 2,700 people were dying from Covid a day.
“The ratio of hospitalization, ICU and death to cases is much lower now than it was many months ago,” Fauci said.
The omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants now make up 80% of Covid infections across the U.S., with BA.5 emerging as the dominant version of the virus. Fauci said BA.5 is more…
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