GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — As the U.S. reaches new records for COVID-19 cases in a single day, some health experts say at this point in the pandemic the numbers should be interpreted differently.
There were 486,428 newly reported cases of COVID Wednesday, a single-day record and a new 14-day average of daily cases record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That's roughly one in every 686 Americans testing positive in a single day.
While the delta and omicron variants explode, hospitalizations for COVID remain far fewer than earlier record highs.
“It might be headline-grabbing to write the number of cases that are occurring,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “That's really not what this pandemic is about at this point.”
Dr. Adalja says we should be changing the way we think of case numbers today.
“People should not be panicking when they see the number of cases go up. This is inevitably going to be a number that increases over the coming weeks. People should be looking at hospitals. Particularly, are hospitals running into capacity problems? That's what everything should be keyed on going forward. It's not cases, it's hospitalizations,” said Adalja.
Dr. Beth Thielen, assistant professor of pediatrics for the University of Minnesota Medical School and pediatric infectious diseases physician for MHealth-Fairview, is taking a more conservative approach.
“To my mind, it's a little early and a little confident to say that right now,” said Dr. Thielen. “We are still in a tough spot with resources to take care of people if they become severely ill. I don't people to get the message that now is the time we can lift off on our other prevention measures, because I think we are still in the midst of what could be a tough winter.”
Thielen acknowledges studies that show the omicron variant can produce less severe disease, but she says disease severity can differ between countries and regions.
She’s also cautious to write off record high case numbers as even a less severe variant could cause an increase in hospitalizations by sheer volume.
We can all hope hospitalizations trend downward with omicron, as ICU capacity remains extremely low.
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