Wave of infections has hospitals filling up
The coronavirus pandemic in America has turned into a patchwork of regional hot spots, with some states hammered by a surge of infections and hospitalizations even as others such as Texas have seen the crisis begin to ease.
The spring wave of the pandemic has driven hospitalizations above 47,000, the highest since March 4.
Thirty-eight states have reported an increase in the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 during the past week, according to a Washington Post analysis of data provided by the Health and Human Services Department.
But the national statistics fail to capture the intensity of the coronavirus emergency in the hardest-hit places. Michigan reported more than 10,000 new infections Tuesday alone. The state Wednesday reported an average of 46 deaths a day, up from 16 a month earlier.
“We’re still climbing, unfortunately,” said Nicholas Gilpin, system medical director for infection prevention at Beaumont Health, which runs eight hospitals in the Detroit area and has more than 800 patients hospitalized.
Michigan officials have pleaded with the White House for more vaccine doses, but the Biden administration has said it will stick to allocations based on state populations. Administration officials stressed that vaccines aren’t rapid-response tools for outbreaks.
“What we need to do in those situations is shut things down,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday. “We need that vaccine in other places. If we vaccinate today, we will have, you know, impact in six weeks, and we don’t know where the next place is going to be that is going to surge.”
Along with Michigan, 32 other states have also registered increases in infections in the past two weeks, including all the states along the Great Lakes from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania.
Minnesota and South Dakota are also up, making the Upper Midwest the major regional center of the spring wave. If there’s a single broad trend, it’s that the northern tier of the country is generally faring worse than the southern.
Other regional hot spots include Maine and New Hampshire in northern New England; Delaware and Maryland in the mid-Atlantic; Colorado, Arizona and Nevada in the Mountain West; and Oregon and Washington in the Pacific Northwest.
By contrast, much of the Deep South, with the exception of Florida and Georgia in recent days, has reported sharp decreases. Since the winter wave ended, West Texas and the Great Plains have seen improving numbers.
“The spring wave has not had a huge amplitude nationally, but has been very regional,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
He and his colleagues have pointed to weather and seasonality as a factor in infection rates, with warmer and lengthening days supporting less virus transmission.
“There’s a clear latitude effect. If you go up into Canada, they’ve been having a really hard time,” he said.
The vaccination campaign appears to have altered the demographics of hospitalizations: With a large majority of elderly people now inoculated, the average age of patients has dropped. Gilpin said patients are generally less ill now than in previous phases of the pandemic.
As of Thursday, more than 76 million people in the United States had been fully vaccinated. The vaccines are not foolproof, however — something known since the first results emerged from clinical trials.
The CDC said Thursday that 5,800 cases of post-vaccination “breakthrough infections” have been reported nationwide. That’s fewer than 1 in 13,000 vaccinations.
Of those breakthrough cases, 29 percent were asymptomatic and 7 percent required hospitalizations. CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said 74 vaccine recipients who had breakthrough infections died.
Separately, officials in Washington state reported Wednesday that 217 people among the 1.7 million fully vaccinated there had suffered breakthrough infections. Five deaths among patients ranging in age from 67 to 94, all with multiple underlying conditions, are under investigation, the state health department said.