COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to steadily rise across the United States, the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 is “spreading quickly” and at least 22 million Americans have gotten the flu, federal health officials said Friday. Photo by Loren Kerns/Flickr
Jan. 6 (UPI) — COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to steadily rise across the United States, the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 is “spreading quickly” and at least 22 million Americans have gotten the flu, federal health officials said Friday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also estimates that so far this season, at least 230,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths from influenza have occurred.
Nationwide, 13 influenza-associated pediatric deaths were reported this week, for a total of 74 pediatric flu deaths reported this season, according to the agency.
Seasonal flu activity “remains high but continues to decline in most areas,” with eight state/jurisdictions reporting moderate activity and 39 reporting high or very high activity, said the CDC, which regularly tracks COVID-19 and flu.
But the agency on Friday backed off its recent forecast that the highly transmissible Omicron variant XBB.1.5 comprises an estimated 41% of all circulating variants, putting the revised figure at 27.6%.
The CDC said its “Nowcast” estimates aren’t real-time counts of COVID-19 variants, but instead are based on modeling since it takes two to three weeks to collect and analyze samples.
Still, only the Omicron subvariant BQ.1.1 has a higher share, at 34.4% of all circulating COVID-19 variants, as of Friday, the agency said.
Nationwide, 470,699 weekly cases of COVID-19 were reported, according to the CDC’s latest data, for the week ended Wednesday. Total cases since the pandemic began now top 101 million.
While there’s been an upward trend since CDC’s Oct. 19 report of 260,450 weekly cases of the coronavirus, the current figure is well below the 1.6 million weekly cases reported in early January 2021 or the nearly 4.1 million cases reported in early January 2022.
Weekly U.S. deaths from COVID-19 stood at 2,731, the latest data show. That’s roughly one-tenth of such deaths at the peak in January 2021.
Total U.S. deaths from COVID-19 have now topped 1 million.
Nationwide, 6,528 new admissions of patients with confirmed COVID-19 were reported for the week ended Wednesday, mostly among people over age 70.
While 85.4% of the U.S. population aged 5 years and above, or nearly 267 million people, have gotten at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, CDC says percentage drops to 15.4%, or 48 million Americans, who have received the updated bivalent booster dose available to adults since September.
