If their average age was around 50 to 64, then we'd expect around 155.1/1e5*266 ~= 0.4 hospitalizations within the entire flu season, not just within one month.
>The 1.5 week old CDC report [1] shows same hospitalization rate as the flu for the vulnerable 65+ population, and less for the vulnerable <18 year population.
Is the hospitalization rate based on how many got the disease or among the general population?
> In the last 24 hours 40 more people were hospitalised with covid-19
Without context this doesn't sound super alarming. In a country of 10 Million, at ostensibly the peak of a wave of infection, 40 people per day are hospitalized. How does that differ from seasonal flu? Or from regular variations in hospitalization? It sounds like it could be a rounding error...
> When unvaccinated COVID patients flood the hospitals [..]
In our part of the world, despite eye-watering infection rates over the last few weeks, hospitals are absolutely nowhere near capacity (and that's putting it mildly).
Were younger and fitter people really flooding hospitals if they got Covid? Thought the data on age and comorbidities is pretty clear and has been for a while now.[0][1]
Do you have a source for this? The math doesn’t add up (vaccinated are 10-15x less likely to be hospitalized, and around 60% of US is vaccinated, implies around 6/46 hospitalized people are vaccinated) and all the sources I could find show that unvaccinated people take up most hospitalizations and even more ICU beds, which is the limiting resource.
> A similar trend was reported by the New York City (NYC) Health Department, which reported that about 2% of Omicron cases were hospitalised in comparison to around 5% of Omicron cases.
Huh? I'm assuming they meant: "...in comparison to around 5% of _Delta_ cases." but who knows?
For further comparison, according to data from the U.S. CDC for the 2018-2019 influenza season, the hospitalization rate was about 1.3%.[1]
I think you are mistaken on two counts. The data is certainly not so self-evident that you can simply assert the parent is wrong.
Deaths are rising in counties that hadn't had significant exposure to covid19 before, and already the trend is heading down across the board. Deaths will be climbing in a couple of hotspots for the next 2 weeks, but total deaths in the entirety of the USA shouldn't exceed 280k.
I agree the virus hasn't become less potent, but hospitals have gotten much, much better at treatment. Remdesivir in particular makes a big difference. Spread in long term care facilities are now tracked nationwide, with terrific results. So the CFR is down by a lot, even though the virus hasn't changed.
Nobody in the US is being denied care because the ICUs are full. Yes, some hospitals are strained but this is not at all unusual. You'll find similar articles about maxed out ICUs from 2018, 2016, etc. First hit on google from jan 2018: "Hospitals Overwhelmed by Flu Patients Are Treating Them in Tents" (https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...). Moving patients to hospitals with spare capacity isn't that big of a deal. Bear in mind that Hospitals are for profit and ICU beds are extremely expensive. As a consequence hospitals target 85%+ ICU utilization throughout the year, otherwise they're losing money.
>38% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 are between 20 and 54. [1]
This is odd statistic to give, considering it's not normalized by how many 20-54 year olds are there. So I clicked through to the original study[1] and found a more helpful figure: people between the ages of 20-44 have a hospitalization rate of 14.3%-20.8%, and an ICU admission rate of 2.0%-4.2%.
I keep hearing statistics like this and I yell at my TV every time. Counting up the people in the hospital is pretty easy, but it doesn't answer the more important question of how many infected 20-54 require hospitalization. Even comparing those numbers to the larger demographics would be helpful.
> It’s hard to make an exact estimate supplemental care like IV’s, oxygen, and in extreme case ventilators roughly cut peoples likelihood of dying in half.
Does that mean people admitted to hospital? Even before vaccination most people who caught it didn’t get sick enough to require hospitalization - there were some (expensive) covid-specific treatments like mABs for those who did of course.
> Also in Germany for example 90% of the covid people in hospitals are fully unvaccinated people.
You'd do well providing some data for this quip. I've spent 10 minutes searching and could not find a confirmation. It's just the generic "hospitals are overwhelmed" BS. At least it's BS in the United States (which has a much higher case load), where you can see whether hospitals are overwhelmed or not, right on HHSs own website: https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
Assuming 99% of people had zero issues then you would see 52 million people completely fine and 520,000 hospitalizations except many people get severely ill without going to a hospital so we would easily be approaching herd immunity.
Instead it’s likely closer to ~3-6% hospitalizations with nearly half of those people dying. With 70,000 people currently in the hospital, expect the death toll to keep increasing. The numbers do look better for young people, but if your thinking of 55+ as old, a huge hunk of the population is old.
PS: The recent bump hit 1,000 deaths per day, but daily peak is still increasing rapidly so expect that to rise significantly.
Thanks. I'm trying to get a handle on the 'how many people need to be hospitalised' statistic because I don't think we've got any outside-of-China stats on that, and its one of the most worrying dimensions of the outbreak.
> But given the severity and high death rate of flu, shouldn't it also have that high level of hospitalization,
Your question is circular. It assumes that the severity and death rate of flu is the same as with COVID19. There's no reason to believe that's true at this point.
> or perhaps covid shouldn't have such a high rate?
The hospitalization rate is what it is. People aren't going to the hospital with COVID19 for the fun of it. They're terribly sick.
>My first link reports 492 total active cases, not thousands.
You are correct, I was looking at total cases, not active cases. My apologies!
However, this still does not support the claim that young people are "widely" going to the hospital. Even assuming that age ranges are going to the hospital at equal rates (which is a preposterous assumption), given 20 total hospitalizations spread across 492 active cases (of which 290 are ages 0-29), we would only expect ~11/290 active COVID cases under 30 to be hospitalized. But again, this an extremely unrealistic upper bound, based on the ludicrous assumption that all ages get hospitalized at equal rates.
On top of that, these data are from Australia, where the population is still not widely vaccinated. I assume the vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients in Victoria are not fully vaccinated.
>The mortality calculated from that is a simple 3.8%.
This (and all previous calculations) depend on accurately estimating the denominator, i.e. the total number of cases. Given the amount of asymptomatic/low symptomatic cases, how is this accurately done? Has the composition of who gets tested shifted over the course of the pandemic? Has it ever actually accurately sampled the true number of cases?
> First, deaths aren't the only measure. For every death there are many more people that just barely survive after a hospital stay, and data suggests a significant amount of those people will have long-term problems.
...where long-term means a few months at most. People do recover, just uncomfortably slowly.
> Second, if the hospitals are overloaded by such people (even if most of them survive) then the IFR of Covid can rise higher than 0.5-1%.
I'm not so sure about that. These IFR estimates haven't changed much since spring, when half of those hospitalized died.[1,2,3] Our treatment methods have improved since then. If the estimates reflected the IFR with treatment, they would be lower today. So I think an IFR of 0.5-1% is actually the worst case.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any source explicitly comparing death rates with vs without treatment.
http://institute.wuhanvirology.org/About_Us/Brief_Introducti...
If their average age was around 50 to 64, then we'd expect around 155.1/1e5*266 ~= 0.4 hospitalizations within the entire flu season, not just within one month.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127795/influenza-us-hos...
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