New U.S. COVID hospitalization record indicates that Omicron surge could be less mild than experts hoped

The U.S. set a new COVID-19 hospitalization record Monday, exceeding 140,000 patients for the first time since the start of the pandemic — a warning sign, experts say, that the nation’s Omicron surge is already more severe than in other countries and will only get worse as it spreads from highly vaccinated cities to less protected parts of the U.S.

America’s previous.hospitalization peak came on Jan. 6, 2021, when 139,781 COVID patients were hospitalized nationwide, according to New York Times data. But that was several months before a mass vaccination effort kicked in and shielded recipients from the vast majority of severe disease.

On Monday, the number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 hit 142,388.

Word of a new U.S. hospitalization record may surprise Americans who have repeatedly heard that the hypermutated Omicron variant — which has triggered an unprecedented wave of breakthrough cases in vaccinated and previously infected individuals — is ultimately milder because it’s less likely to seriously sicken those who catch it.

“I think people have fixated on this idea that it’s mild,” New York University epidemiologist Céline Gounder recently told New York magazine. “Mild means mild — relatively mild — for the individual who’s infected. But it does not necessarily mean mild at a population level.”

The new U.S. hospitalization numbers — including rising ICU admissions in the cities Omicron has struck first — suggest just that: If even a milder variant infects enough people, the resulting surge can be anything but “mild.”

The problem, as Gounder and others have pointed out, is twofold.

First, there is a ton of virus circulating right now, with an average number of new daily cases (the current 7-day average stands at 677,243) that’s nearly three times higher than ever before. Virologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson institute in Seattle has calculated that tests are now catching just one in four or five U.S. infections — which means that Omicron is actually infecting more than 3 million Americans each day.

Second, this once unthinkable level of spread guarantees that Omicron is finding as many people at increased risk of hospitalization as possible: the entirely unvaccinated (83 million Americans); the vaccinated but unboosted (132 million Americans); and especially seniors who are not boosted (26 million) or even fully vaccinated (7 million) and who remain most susceptible to severe disease.

Then, just like earlier versions of the virus, Omicron is sending far too many of them — nearly all of whom are unvaccinated or undervaccinated — to the hospital. ...