CA Omicron Infections Dip As Hospitalizations Remain High

CALIFORNIA — California's omicron surge may have passed its peak in California as far as case numbers go. But hospitalizations, which tend to lag behind infections, remain astonishingly high.

Hospitalizations related to COVID-19 in California hit a peak on Jan. 20 — 15,393 — but that number was still lower than the pinnacle of 22,000 patients in January 2021.

The new omicron variant hammered California over the holiday season, delivering a blow to the state's COVID-19 testing and health care infrastructure. Some 40 percent of the state's hospitals expected critical staff shortages, and some reported as much as one quarter of their staff out for virus-related reasons, said Kiyomi Burchill of the California Hospital Association.

Since the omicron variant is known to cause less severe disease in those who are vaccinated, the main metric of concern has been hospitalizations. That number was a daily indicator of both the severity of the current wave of infections and a snapshot of a vulnerable health care system.

The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in California reached a high of more than 15,390 last week. As of Monday, that number had dipped to 15,204, a small but encouraging sign.

The highest number of the hospitalized —4,573 — were in Los Angeles County as of Monday.

COVID-19-related hospitalizations were expected to increase to 23,000 by Feb. 2, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, well above the record of nearly 22,000 hospitalizations a year ago.

"It's manageable, but it's challenging," Newsom said of the projection earlier this month.

Cases were expected to drop in California in the coming weeks, according to researchers at Washington State University.

The state's positivity rate was 20.4 percent on Monday, down slightly from 21.2 percent last week.

“I think it’s important to keep in mind though that, while thankfully we think the peak may have happened, we are still at higher levels of transmission than we have ever seen,” said Dr. Erica Pan, California state epidemiologist, according to CapRadio.

But short-staffed hospitals around the state were overwhelmed with the influx of COVID-19 patients. Pan said last week that hospitals in the state are "certainly at maximum capacity now."

"While the numbers maybe percentagewise are smaller, the totality of those getting this variant are such that it's going to put tremendous strain on our hospital system," Newsom said earlier this month.

Around 4.5 percent of people infected with the variant will end up hospitalized, Newsom said previously. Those patients will remain in a hospital bed for about 3.6 days on average, he said.

New evidence from nearly 70,000 patients in Southern California suggests omicron is causing milder illness than delta. But the sheer volume in cases has quickly contributed to a steep influx of patients this winter in the Golden State and worldwide, according to Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, the World Health Organization's regional director for Europe

"This is in addition to a delta burden that has not entirely passed and also to the high number of incidental admissions," Kluge said. On the upside, hospitalizations with omicron result much less frequently in intensive care unit admission, and the newer variant in fact "offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization."

Nevertheless, "it is dangerous to assume that omicron will be the last variant or that we are in the endgame," said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO's director-general.

The daily coronavirus positivity rate is a function of the number of tests compared to the number of cases confirmed positive each day. The Golden State has also recorded an average of 97,275 new cases daily in the past eight weeks, a sharp rise.

Deaths recorded daily have fallen slightly to an average of 47 per day for the last eight weeks. But hospitalizations remain a top concern as high capacity can contribute to more deaths, said Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and scientific director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s forecasting center.

“In places with extremely short staffing and overloads of patients, as the medical professionals have been telling us, the quality of care begins to suffer," Lipsitch said. "That may also lead to higher death rates, but that’s not in any of the models that I’m aware of.”

The fast-moving omicron variant may cause less severe disease on average, but COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. were climbing, and modelers forecast 50,000 to 300,000 more Americans could die by the time the wave subsides in mid-March.

The seven-day rolling average for daily new COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. has trended upward since mid-November, reaching nearly 1,700 on Jan. 17 — still below the peak of 3,300 in January 2021. COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents started rising slightly two weeks ago, although they remain at a rate 10 times less than last year before most residents were vaccinated.

“A lot of people are still going to die because of how transmissible omicron has been,” said University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. “It unfortunately is going to get worse before it gets better.”

So where do we stand with the COVID-19 pandemic, and when will it end? WHO released its assessment on Monday.

"We have a long way to go," Ghebreyesus said. But he saw a path in which member nations could "end the acute phase of the pandemic this year."

By themselves, vaccines "are not the golden ticket out of the pandemic," but a high inoculation rate still remains a key component of the recovery, according to Ghebreyesus. The WHO has set as its goal a global 70 percent vaccination rate, with an emphasis on the most at-risk groups.

From our perch here in the California, that almost looks doable.

In the U.S., a little over 63 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, and over 76 percent have received at least one dose, according to the CDC. The Golden State has 81.3 percent of its population vaccinated.

Patch Editor Rich Kirby and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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This article originally appeared on the Los Angeles Patch