More than 100,000 people are currently hospitalized with Covid-19 in the United States of America, according to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). That number puts the US in a worse place than August of last year.
There were 100,317 people hospitalized with the virus Wednesday — more than double the 48,851 in the hospital on the same day last year.
Covid-19 hospitalizations have been on the rise in the US for about seven weeks, since early July. They have nearly tripled in the past month and have grown by 10% in the past week alone.
With 48.3% of the US still not fully vaccinated, cases are on the rise once again, and with them has come strain on hospitals struggling to treat the wave of incoming patients.
Florida has been hit particularly hard with the worst per capita rate in the country — about 80 hospitalizations per 100,000 people — followed by Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana, each with more than 55 hospitalizations per 100,000 people, according to HHS data.
“I had to turn away a cancer patient that needed an emergency treatment,” Florida oncologist Dr. Nitesh Paryani told CNN. “For the first time in sixty years of my family’s history of treating cancer, we had to turn someone away … We just didn’t have a bed. There was simply no room in the hospital to treat the patient.”
Paryani said his Tampa emergency room recently had a twelve hour wait.
In New Mexico, the acting secretary of health, Dr. David Scrase, said if nothing changes, the state is on track to reach crisis standards of care within the next week to accommodate the continued rise in cases.
Scrase said Covid-19 intensive care hospitalizations have risen so quickly, officials are having trouble creating accurate charts to illustrate it.
“Because we’re at over 100% capacity, these beds are filled before we get time to make the map,” he said.
Not only are the raw numbers significantly worse than they were last year, but the situation is made even more tragic by the measures of protection that have become available since then, Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee said.
“Last August, we had a fully susceptible population, and we didn’t have a vaccine. Now, we have half the country vaccinated, and many have already been naturally infected, which is protective,” Offit said. “But nonetheless the numbers are worse … the delta variant is one big game changer.”
