Hospitalizations due to severe COVID-19 continue to climb throughout the United States, rising to levels similar to summer 2020.
Per Axios, more than 40,000 people are currently hospitalized in the United States because of COVID-19. That number climbed to more than 51,000 on Tuesday.
Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research, tweeted a chart that shows the COVID-19 hospitalizations and said the hospitalizations wave from COVID-19 right now “clearly will surpass waves 1 and 2” from 2020.
- They aren’t near winter 2020/2021 numbers yet — just before the COVID-19 vaccine was released to the public — but are still headed upwards.
Per Axios, most of the hospitalizations are among unvaccinated Americans. Still, a small number of vaccinated Americans have been hospitalized due to COVID-19 in recent weeks. However, that number is really small and vaccines remain the top method to stopping severe COVID-19.
Indeed, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that about 99.999% of fully vaccinated Americans had not had a breakthrough COVID-19 case that led to hospitalization or death, which I wrote about for the Deseret News.
The CDC data show that there were about 6,587 COVID-19 breakthrough cases that led to hospitalization or death among 163 million fully vaccinated Americans, according to CNN.
- 6,239 cases led to hospitalization.
- 1,263 cases led to death.
Correction: This article previously said there were 6,587 COVID-19 breakthrough cases. Rather, there were 6,587 COVID-19 breakthrough cases that led to hospitalization or death.