“This is part of the winter surge, part of the long term, so we implemented many of the mitigation strategies and measures early on to help provide some flexibility to hospitals and healthcare systems,” said the Governor of New Hampshire, Chris. Sununu said on Wednesday.
Five other states are very close to 10% of UCI’s remaining capacity, according to HHS data: New Mexico, Missouri, Rhode Island, Mississippi and Georgia. Nationwide, COVID-19 hospitalizations have reached record levels with at least 151,261 Americans needing care as of Wednesday.
“Omicron continues to burn in the community, growing at levels we’ve never seen before. Omicron is significantly more contagious than even the Delta variant,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said Monday. “If it spreads at the rate we’re seeing, it will certainly fill our hospitals.”
“The problem is that right now we have hospitals where there are not enough nurses to take care of the incoming patients, the covid patients and the non-covid patients,” Spencer told CNN’s Laura Coates on Wednesday.
“This is exactly why we must do everything possible to try to limit the number of infected people, not just those who are older or not vaccinated or not boosted, but everyone. Because each infection represents a potential to infect more people. We we need to do what we can to stop that spread right now and ease the pressure on our hospitals, “Spencer said.
For those who enter emergency rooms for reasons unrelated to Covid but test positive, hospitals have yet to invoke quarantine protocols for those patients, putting pressure on operations, he said. And that can have an effect on all patients.
“Right now, we are still seeing sick people in need of oxygen, the vast majority of whom are not vaccinated. But many of the patients that we are seeing right now have underlying chronic conditions that are being exacerbated,” Spencer said.
Those patients, he said, can include “someone who contracts COVID is dehydrated and needs to stay in the hospital, or someone who contracts COVID and is too weak and cannot go home because of the risk of falling.” In a sense, it’s just as bad as those kinds of classic Covid patients we were seeing before. But each patient who needs to stay in the hospital occupies a bed. And beds and staff is what is in short supply right now. “
CDC to update the mask guide
The United States averaged more than 771,580 new COVID-19 cases daily over the past week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, more than three times the average high from last winter.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to update information on mask use, including the different levels of protection that various masks, such as cloth, surgical, or N95, provide against the spread of covid. -19, said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a virtual briefing at the White House on Wednesday.
In general, it is important that people wear whatever mask they have access to, “but Omicron has changed things a bit because it is so communicable that we know that masks are even more important,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, he told CNN on Wednesday.
Effective vaccines in adolescents, study shows
The country has averaged 1,817 COVID-19 deaths per day over the past week, JHU data shows. The maximum daily average was 3402 a year ago, on January 13, 2021.
However, the CDC’s latest joint forecast predicts a potential 62,000 new COVID-19 deaths over the next four weeks, meaning that preventive vaccines are still needed.
The least vaccinated age group of Americans is still under 18, and a new study of data from real-world hospitals between July and the end of October points to the effectiveness of vaccines even for those who, being younger, generally are with lower risk.
The findings, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, show that the Pfizer / BioNTech coronavirus vaccine appears to be 94% effective against COVID-19 hospitalization among adolescents ages 12 to 18 in the US. USA
“Vaccination prevented nearly all life-threatening COVID-19 diseases in this age group,” wrote researchers from the CDC and a collection of hospitals and universities, who found that many more adolescents hospitalized with COVID-19 were not. vaccinated compared to those who were hospitalized for other reasons.
Among adolescents hospitalized with Covid-19, 4% were fully vaccinated, less than 1% were partially vaccinated, and 96% were not vaccinated. By comparison, of those without COVID-19, 36% were fully vaccinated, 7% were partially vaccinated, and 57% were unvaccinated.
CNN’s Jacqueline Howard, Deidre McPhillips, Naomi Thomas, Virginia Langmaid, Jason Hanna, Christina Maxouris, Claudia Domínguez, and Andy Rose contributed to this report.
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