In the past 7 days, hospitalizations rose by 107% in Florida, matching the rate of COVID19 growth from a week or two ago.
We're _already_ seeing the massive increase in hospitalization numbers in Florida. Its a time-delayed compared to case-counts, but its clearly hitting Florida now. What do you think will happen in the next week (when last week had +300% case count) ??
There was a blip in the data for Christmas / Christmas Eve (I dunno if that's because fewer people were working, or if fewer people decided to go into the hospital). But otherwise, the trajectory and hospital usage number-trend is pretty clear and evident already.
>While COVID-19’s omicron variant pushes Florida to pandemic daily records in cases reported and has drive-thru testing lines snaking through parks and pharmacy parking lots, hospitalizations haven’t risen at the same rate — yet. Sunday’s report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said there were 2,302 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Florida. That’s 39 more people hospitalized than in Saturday’s report and from 245 hospitals, as opposed to the 246 hospitals in Saturday’s report. COVID-19 patients occupy 4.27% of patient beds in those reporting hospitals, compared to 4.18% in the previous day’s reporting hospitals. Of the people hospitalized in Florida, 333 were in intensive care unit beds, a decrease of nine. That represents about 5.41% of the state’s ICU hospital beds, compared to 5.55% the previous day.
The first line of the article is "The number of Covid patients in Florida hospitals has risen to a new high, breaking records set during previous waves before vaccines were available."
Then, there's a quote to that effect from a doctor, specific to their hospital.
> The fact that more people are in the hospital in Florida right now than at any time in the last two years
THIS IS NOT TRUE.
The metric you are describing is hospital census, which is _not_ at an all-time high right now.
What is at an all time high? The percentage of people in the hospital who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, regardless of their presentation.
The roundtable just yesterday confirmed that there are hospitals which have near 100% positivity, despite 80% presenting for things unrelated to a respiratory infection.
Some people are there for blunt trauma or routine surgery, but have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
I just don't understand the point of constantly misrepresenting this metric. It muddies the waters of actual concerns about the spread of the virus by making it seem like those are are concerned are dishonest.
> If cases keep rising I don't see any reason why hospitalizations and deaths won't follow.
They already have. Hospitalization rates have multiplied by a factor of nearly 4x from the 12,000 COVID hospitalizations in early July to the 40,000 COVID hospitalizations today in early August.
Interestingly, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation [1] out of UW is still predicting Florida will not run out of hospital beds, unlike many other states. I don't know what to do with this data, but I was surprised given the concern in the media for the state due to the older population and lack of stay-at-home order until now.
> why hospitalizations keep going up in this roadmap when every country that has put strict social distancing measures in effect starts to see a leveling-off and decrease in hospitalization after around the 3 week mark
Because that's not a safe assumption. Hospitalizations are still going up in areas across the US, even in areas of US that are now on week 4 or 5 of lockdown.
Download the linked data from the article
https://healthdata.gov/dataset/covid-19-reported-patient-imp...
and the first column is already "critical_staffing_shortage_today_yes" showing 0 for non-COVID-wave period and high numbers around March and since September.
I my opinion the number of hospitalisations per 1 million people isn't reflective because there is only a fixed amount of hospital beds (less ICU, though they keep expanding as much as possible) available. Hospitals reschedule everything to keep beds free and have spare capacity. My take-away from the article is that luckily now as well as last year about 25% bed capacity is available. The total number of beds seems to be 49480 (https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/HospitalB...)
"it has become clear that the entire pretext for shutting down our liberties is built upon misinformation and lack of context". Should we trust medical and epidemology experts or https://www.theblaze.com/u/danielhorowitz
> ... roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease ... this study suggests that COVID hospitalization tallies can’t be taken as a simple measure of the prevalence of severe or even moderate disease, because they might inflate the true numbers by a factor of two ... referring to decisions about school closures, business restrictions, mask requirements, and so on, “we should refine the definition of hospitalization. Those patients who are there with rather than from COVID don’t belong in the metric.”
> I just don't understand the point of constantly misrepresenting this metric. It muddies the waters of actual concerns about the spread of the virus by making it seem like those are are concerned are dishonest.
> Stop it.
That must be this "projection" I keep hearing about.
> but I don't get why (from what I've seen) hospitalizations don't seem to be all that important when reporting on COVID numbers in general.
To an extent, by the time the hospital numbers are going up sharply, it's too late, and the hospitals will inevitably be overwhelmed, so it's not a good guide of policy. New case count is the only vaguely timely indicator we have.
In the past 7 days, hospitalizations rose by 107% in Florida, matching the rate of COVID19 growth from a week or two ago.
We're _already_ seeing the massive increase in hospitalization numbers in Florida. Its a time-delayed compared to case-counts, but its clearly hitting Florida now. What do you think will happen in the next week (when last week had +300% case count) ??
There was a blip in the data for Christmas / Christmas Eve (I dunno if that's because fewer people were working, or if fewer people decided to go into the hospital). But otherwise, the trajectory and hospital usage number-trend is pretty clear and evident already.
reply