COVID hospitalizations in U.S. at highest level since February as Florida tops all-time record
Coronavirus is causing hospital wards to swell again, with nearly 56,000 COVID-19 patients receiving inpatient care across the U.S. on Tuesday and Florida hitting an all-time state record.
The 55,767 COVID-19 patients in hospitals Tuesday marked the highest national level since February, the new data from the The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services showed.
In Florida, 11,863 people were in hospital beds receiving care for confirmed cases, federal officials said.
It was Sunday that Florida first shattered its longstanding hospitalizations record, reporting 10,207 people hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 cases.
The prior record was 10,170 hospitalization set back in July 2020, months before vaccinations won emergency approval and long before the dreaded delta variant became a household name.
Since then Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican said to be eyeing a 2024 presidential bid, has steered away from pandemic restrictions and even signed an executive order preventing mask mandates in schools. Meanwhile, more than half of the Sunshine State still remains unvaccinated.
“It’s unfortunate. The problem is that we have politicized this pandemic. The facts do matter, and the facts are that Florida has had 20,000-plus new cases the last several days and the majority of its hospitals are now full,” Dr. Waleed Javaid, director of infection prevention and control at Mount Sinai Downtown in Manhattan, told the Daily News.
“I’m worried,” he said. “I became a doctor to help save lives, and to see people getting sick from an illness that is vaccine-preventable, it hurts me to see that happening.”
Florida is one of several states with high or substantial community transmission in every county. The others include Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana and South Carolina.
Experts stress the overwhelming number of COVID patients now admitted for care in American hospitals are either unvaccinated or vaccinated but immunocompromised.
Jason Salemi, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of South Florida, said the surge in his home state is hardly a surprise, largely due to the more contagious delta variant.
“The delta variant is much better at being able to bind to our cells, replicate within our cells’ machinery, and when people get infected, they have up to 1,000 times the amount of virus in their upper respiratory tract, and that means they’re much more likely to spread it from person to person,” he told the Daily News.
“And Florida is a really big state with a lot of people. Even though we’re at about 50% of our population that has been fully vaccinated, that means there’s still more than 8 million people who are vaccine eligible who are not fully vaccinated yet,” he said, also mentioning the state’s 2.8 million children younger than 12 who don’t yet qualify.
Salemi said many people also “received mixed messaging about appropriate mitigation behaviors in public indoor settings and had some understandable pandemic fatigue” when the case numbers started falling during the spring, so mask wearing has taken a hit.
And of course Florida’s hot and humid summer has been pushing more people indoors, where the virus spreads more easily, he said.
“That confluence of factors, all of those things together, is really driving the dramatic increases we’ve observed in just the past five weeks,” he said.
In New York City and the state at large, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 stood at 422 and 852 respectively on Monday.
Those figures are way down from the horrific highs reached in April 2020, but they’re still up about 150% compared to a month ago.
Thankfully, the daily death rate in the state has remained in the single digits over the last month despite the spike in hospitalizations.
“We all need to think about people beyond ourselves,” Javaid said, stressing that vaccines are our best shot at keeping people out of hospitals and ending the pandemic.
“Years from now, we’ll look back, and we’re going to see what part we played,” he said. “People who were vaccinated are going to be the most important part. Those will be the leaders who saved us.”
