Via John Burn-Murdoch, @jburnmurdoch – Stories, stats & scatterplots for @FinancialTimes | Mainly Covid for now | Visiting senior fellow @LSEdataScience | john.burn [email protected] | “Key question with Omicron wave is whether severe disease — hospitalisations & ICU — decouples from cases. In the UK it has, but there are signs the US decoupling is weaker, perhaps due in part to lower vax rates. Here’s a quick recap of how to read these charts – Track Covid here for every state: Black dotted line is peak level for each metric before Omicron arrived. Crossing that line means a new record has been set in recent days. I’ve put a little coloured circle below the name of each state to indicate new records…[Note – The United States has set a record for new cases – 35 states are breaking case records, 10 states are breaking hospitalization records, and 3 states are breaking ICU records (Maryland, DC, and Ohio). ]

• Also via Katelyn Jetelina from Your Local Epidemiologist: “…The capacity of the United States’ hospital system is of the utmost importance. And a lot of states are starting to creep into trouble. A hospital capacity database, created by Bill Hanage, Benjy Renton, and Jeremy Faust, predicts when circuit breakers are needed. Circuit breakers are short-term mitigation measures needed to preserve hospital functioning, like stopping elective surgeries and/or strict community measures to flatten the curve (like eliminating indoor dining, stopping concerts, and encouraging working from home). There are zero states at this point, but 18 states are forecast to exceed capacity within the next 1-10 days. This may have already happened in D.C., as the D.C. Hospital Association requested Health State of Emergency to reimplement Crisis Standards of Care yesterday. An additional 14 states are at an “unsustainable” hospital capacity and 20 states “have capacity.” While states as a whole haven’t reached circuit-breaker status yet, 585 counties peppered throughout the United States are considered to be at breaking point and policy makers really need to do something at this point…”
• See also the New York Times Viz – Here’s When We Expect Omicron to Peak