Vermont reported its second-highest number of people hospitalized for Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
The Department of Health reported that 100 people were hospitalized for the virus Friday, just missing the record of 101 patients set Monday. That’s compared with an average of 50 to 60 hospitalizations prior to the December holiday season, which set off a dramatic rise in case counts combined with the spread of the Omicron variant.
Twenty-four people were in intensive care units, a decline from 28 on Thursday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 96% of cases in New England were the Omicron variant, a less severe variant than the original strain or the Delta variant.
However, the spike in cases may still be driving an increase in the number of Vermonters seeking hospital care. The state reported 2,295 cases Friday, leading to a seven-day average of 1,779 cases per day — about four times the number of cases around Christmas.
On Tuesday, department Commissioner Mark Levine said “lots of people are going to get Omicron,” but whether someone becomes “deathly ill” depends on their vaccination status.
As of Tuesday, 55% of hospitalized patients and 63% of critical care patients were unvaccinated, according to a report from the Department of Financial Regulation. In comparison, only 21% of Vermonters 5 and older are not fully vaccinated.
The department also added three more deaths to its data. In total, 493 people have died throughout the course of the pandemic, including 13 in January.
That puts January on course to have fewer deaths than December, when 62 deaths were reported. Cases and hospitalizations dropped in late December, and deaths tend to lag behind other metrics of case severity.
How Vermont compares
Vermont is not alone in its Omicron struggles. Cases have risen 133% across the United States in the past two weeks, while hospitalizations have risen 79%. Two days ago, the nation set a new record for the daily average of hospitalized patients, according to The New York Times.
[Looking for data on breakthrough cases? See our reporting on the latest available statistics.]
The hardest-hit states include Rhode Island, New York and Delaware, which reported the highest case rates in the country compared with their population in the past two weeks. Vermont ranks ninth in the nation by that metric, the Times reported, with about 276 cases per 100,000 people in the past two weeks.
Vermont’s hospitalization rate, by contrast, ranks it as fourth-lowest in the nation, while Delaware, New Jersey and New York have the highest rates. Vermont has a rate of about 17 hospitalizations per 100,000 people.
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