COVID-19 still spreading, but less deadly than last year

Dec. 31—Dr. Stan Martin picked a simple phrase to contrast COVID-19's spread over the holidays this year and last.

"It is certainly night and day," said Martin, director of infectious diseases for the Geisinger health system.

The numbers of hospitalizations and new cases and deaths are down dramatically compared to last year, a review of state Health Department data shows.

Pennsylvania had 79,761 new recorded cases in the week before the last Wednesday of 2021. This year, it was 12,965, an 83.8% decline. In the seven-county northeast region — Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike, Susquehanna, Wayne and Wyoming — new cases plummeted from 4,795 to 929, an 80.6% decline.

The department now issues new weekly data every Wednesday.

Deaths declined similarly: 721 to 94 statewide, an 87% drop, and 55 to nine in the region, an 83.6% drop.

The 94 deaths this week represented the first week with fewer than 100 since early August, past Department of Health data shows.

Last year, COVID-19 patients overwhelmed hospitals with 4,813 people hospitalized on the last Wednesday. This year, it was 1,531, a 68.2% decline and about half the peak hospitalization figure in the pandemic's early days. In the region, only 74 were hospitalized as of Wednesday compared to 317 last year, or 76.7% fewer.

"We are not experiencing that kind of surge phenomena that we experienced last year, which really, really was impactful across all of health care and across our entire population," Martin said. "The funny thing is, of course, is that COVID has not exactly gone away, right? We still have quite a bit of it, in our community and in our hospitals. But it's been fairly stable. It's been a little bit more predictable. And from that standpoint, (it's) made it a little bit easier to manage."

Martin thinks two big reasons explain the difference.

First, COVID's omicron variants last winter were far more virulent and dangerous.

"We've seen a virus that seems to be a little less virulent than some of its predecessors, meaning it doesn't seem to be causing as severe disease," he said. "Now, that's not to say it's totally benign, right? There are still plenty of people who are very susceptible to it, the elderly, people with severe lung, heart problems and people who have problems with their immune systems for various medical reasons. And so we still do, of course, see people die from COVID."

The other reason: The population has developed immunity through plenty of vaccinations and catching COVID, Martin said.

"So we certainly don't have anything like what you might think of as traditional herd immunity. But thanks to vaccination and prior infection, we see that people who have a certain degree of immune response, even if it's not enough ... to prevent them from getting infected, we see that the consequences of the infection are now much less than they used to be," he said.

Since late summer, Geisinger's daily COVID-19 patients have numbered mostly from the 60s to as many as 100, Martin said.

Hospitalized patients also less often require remdesivir, the primary drug treatment for serious cases.

"The value of that drug really only lies in patients who truly have pneumonia and they're having trouble with their breathing," Martin said. "And so that tells me that actually, even though the number of COVID cases we've had in the hospital have been fairly stable, most of those COVID cases have been relatively minor (compared to the pandemic's early days)."

Only about 5% of hospitalized COVID patients die now, compared to 20% at the pandemic's peak, he said. They are usually elderly people with other, underlying medical conditions.

Dr. James Cruse, chief medical officer for the Wayne Memorial Community Health Centers, thinks case totals are vastly underreported.

"It's a lot worse than that because we're getting calls every day of patients that have positive home tests. And the difference is, the home tests aren't getting recorded," Cruse said.

Many doctors probably aren't as vigilant about reporting positive tests any longer, too, he said.

Cruse agreed greater immunity from vaccinations and previous COVID exposure has lowered death and hospitalization counts. At least five in six American adults have some immunity because of vaccinations or previous infection, according to a study by the Covid States Project, a consortium of scholars at five U.S. universities. The project released the study earlier this month.

Martin again debunked the myth that COVID vaccines don't work. Vaccinated people may get the virus, but the vaccinated don't get as sick.

"Out of the last 326 patients who've been admitted to Geisinger (hospitals) with COVID, only one of them was fully vaccinated. All the others were not fully vaccinated," he said.

His message remains: Get vaccinated.

Contact the writer: bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9147; @BorysBlogTT on Twitter.