Hot spots grow, raising strain on health providers

When the coronavirus was in retreat across the United States in late February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new recommendations that veered away from depending on the number of new cases in a community to determine the need for pandemic safety measures.

The focus shifted more toward the number of hospitalized people with the virus. Far more new cases than before would be required to push a community into the medium or high-risk categories.

The change turned most of the U.S. map green at a stroke. Until then, 95% of counties in the United States were considered high-risk, but afterward, fewer than one-third of Americans were living in places in that category, the agency said. The new guidelines gave millions of people confidence to remove their face masks, and recommended that as long as the pressure on hospitals remained manageable, the country could return to some version of normal life.

That strategy will be put to the test in the next few weeks, because hospitalizations are rising again nationally. As of Thursday, an average of more than 18,000 people with the coronavirus are in American hospitals, an increase of 20% from two weeks ago.

The influx has been even steeper in the largest high-risk area now on the national map, the hot spot that has spread across upstate New York and spilled into nearby states. According to New York state, there were 2,119 patients hospitalized in the state with COVID-19 on Tuesday, 47% more than the figure from two weeks before.

The figure is still well below the winter omicron peak of January, when about 13,000 people were hospitalized statewide. But it has been increasing, propelled by rapidly spreading BA.2 subvariants, which have become a growing share of new U.S. cases.

Other hot spots are also putting pressure on health care systems. In Puerto Rico, 245 people on the island were in hospitals this week with the virus, more than five times the caseload from a month ago.

Though hospitalizations generally lag behind the trends in new cases, they remain among the most reliable kinds of data about the pandemic, experts agree — much more so than official reports of positive test results, which experts say significantly understate the true number of infections.