NY reports more than 90 thousand cases of COVID; dozens of upstate hospitals stop elective surgeries – Telemundo New York (47)

What you should know

• New York Governor Kathy Hochul continues to push for vaccination and testing as the state battles its worst wave of COVID-19 in a year. Still, he said Friday that he was hopeful New York is seeing the first signs that cases are declining.
• Hospitalizations are the highest since April 2020 but they don’t tell the whole story. 37% of COVID-19 patients admitted to New York have no symptoms, and one CEO says it’s “very, very rare” to see a booster patient admitted.
• In New York City, half of hospitalized patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were admitted because of the virus. The other half were admitted for something else and found to have COVID-19 during routine tests

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A day after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul shared optimism about COVID case trends showing a slower growth rate, the state experienced another record day with 90,132 new positive cases reported on Saturday.

The day before, on Friday, Governor Hochul reported 82,094 new cases of COVID, which represented a drop of a few hundred from the previous day and about 3,300 positives below the old single-day pandemic record of 85,476 reported on New Year’s Day.

The 90,132 new positives represent approximately 21% of a total of 425,782 COVID-19 tests conducted statewide. More than one in five New York COVID-19 tests are testing positive these days, and the city’s seven-day moving average of positive tests is currently one in three.

“Our vaccination rate among children is still too low. Parents and guardians do not delay in vaccinating and boosting their children, if they qualify. It is safe and widely available. This is one of the best ways to maintain our low numbers, in addition to wearing a mask and staying home if sick, “the governor said Saturday in her daily COVID statement.

Also on Friday, eThe State revealed that pediatric hospitalizations for COVID-19 increased eightfold in New York from the beginning of December to the end of the month, and the vast majority of those children were not vaccinated.

The new report follows an ominous Christmas Eve advisory to pediatricians, warning that hospitalizations rose rapidly as the Omicron variant spread across the state.

Friday’s report indicates that the situation only continued to get worse after that. In the week ending Jan. 1, there were 571 pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide, the New York State Department of Health said, compared with 70 just weeks earlier.

Of those admitted, 91% of children between 5 and 11 years old were not vaccinated, as well as 65% of children between 12 and 17 years old.

But overall, more than half of the hospitalizations were in children 4 years of age or younger, who are not yet eligible for vaccines. Children under the age of 4 make up about a quarter of all children in the state, which means they are being hospitalized at about twice the proportion of the population.

In New York City alone, hospitalizations for COVID-19 in those under 18 years of age increased 17 times, more than double the growth rate of the general population.

Concerns about hospitals have taken a renewed focus in upstate New York, with the state announcing on Saturday the suspension of elective surgeries at 40 hospitals. The vast majority of affected hospitals reside in the Mohawk Valley, Finger Lakes and Central New York regions, according to the state announcement. No hospitals in New York City were added to the list.

Those hospitals in the state’s “high-risk regions” must postpone surgeries for at least two weeks while officials track the latest incoming data and hospital capacity.

“We will use all available tools to help ensure that hospitals can handle the winter surge in COVID-19,” Acting State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett said Saturday.

Meanwhile, the CDC director said Friday that she doesn’t think the United States has reached the Omicron peak yet. But that could happen sooner than expected if the numbers in New York this week are any indication of what could happen next.

A quick look at New York City case trends shows what appears to be a decline in new cases, but the data is four days behind. That failure in the seven-day average could reflect a lower number of COVID-19 tests during the holidays rather than the first indications of the omicron decline, or perhaps not. Time will tell.

At the same time, new cases are declining due to exponential increases, sometimes doubling daily in New York City, the two lagging indicators, those of most concern to officials, hospitalizations and deaths, are rising sharply.

That has happened in almost every wave of the pandemic so far. The governor reported 154 new deaths from COVID-19 on Saturday, one less than the previous day, which recorded the highest number of deaths in a single day since the launch of the mass vaccination.

Hospitalizations rose to 11,843 statewide as of Saturday, the highest total since April 28, 2020, and mark an increase of nearly 300 patients over the last day. Almost half of current admissions are in New York City.

“It’s still a very high number. If this correlates properly with our number of cases, then hospitalizations should start to see the beginning of a plateau,” Hochul said.

The stock of COVID patients in New York hospitals as part of the total has doubled since just before Christmas, state data shows, but those proportions alone don’t tell the whole story. Forty-two percent of hospitalized COVID patients were not admitted because they tested positive for COVID, state data shows.

They were admitted for another illness, were tested as part of the routine admission process, and tested positive for COVID. COVID still represents the primary diagnosis for hospitalized patients with the virus statewide (58% vs. 42%), but a large relative proportion of people in the hospital with COVID did not go there because of it. That suggests the milder nature of Ómicron compared to previous variants, especially, again, when it comes to people who are fully vaccinated.

Dr. Craig Spencer of the Manhattan emergency room addressed that item in a lengthy Twitter thread earlier this week, when he said that with Omicron, “people get sick in a different way“As if they went to the hospital because they are sick with an underlying disease, and then they contracted COVID on top of that.

It’s not a total wave of Omicron patients, he and others say. And that is unfolding in different ways in New York.

New York City, for example, where the split is most notable at 50-50, has the second highest rate of complete immunization for adults (84.3%) of the 10 regions in the state, behind only Long Island (86.6% ), where one of the two county executives have been at war with the state over the use of masks and other COVID-19 protocols.

Vaccination rates among children, whose hospitalization rates soared across New York state last month, vary more widely. More than 19.4% of New York City children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, as are 71.8% of children ages 12 to 17. On Long Island, those figures are 16.2% and 64.6%, respectively.

Governor Hochul called it a “very interesting snapshot” of what she’s seeing across the state. Thirty-seven percent of current state hospitalizations for COVID-19 are asymptomatic, the governor added.

Ultimately, deaths are likely to rise as a default consequence of rising hospitalization rates, but the milder nature of Omicron vs. delta, along with the power of vaccines to prevent serious illness and death, should mitigate the increases. And some of those who die may not be dying primarily from COVID at all.

Public health experts have said they do not expect the peak of this latest wave of COVID until February, although they acknowledge the unpredictability of the virus.

The CDC director says there could certainly be a rapid decline in cases rather than a slow decline in cases, given the way Ómicron has developed in countries it hit first, like South Africa. But she doesn’t think America is at that point yet.

“The number of cases is increasing faster than the number of hospitalizations and deaths, although now we are also beginning to see the number of hospitalizations increasing,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky told the program. “TODAY“from NBC in an interview on Friday.” The way it has peaked in other countries, in South Africa, has also declined rapidly, but I don’t think we’ve seen the peak yet here in the United States. “

“I will say that our hospitals right now are full of people who are not vaccinated and that you are 17 times more likely to be in a hospital and 20 times more likely to die if you are not vaccinated compared to if you are vaccinated,” she added. “There is a lot we can do right now, get vaccinated and get the booster dose. We have 99% of our counties in high transmission, wear your mask in closed public places.”

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