Covid-19 exposure risk: 1/20/2022
The number of cases per capita is approaching 400% compared to last winter’s peak. All counties are at extremely high levels of risk for unvaccinated people.
The Omicron variant has pushed the country’s daily case reports to record levels, with more than 800,000 new infections being reported each day.
Most of the country continues to see explosive case growth, but infection levels seem to have peaked in some of the places that were hit first by Omicron. Puerto Rico, Cleveland, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., are among the places beginning to see improvement.
About 150,000 coronavirus patients are hospitalized nationwide, more than at any previous point in the pandemic. That figure includes so-called incidental infections of people with minor symptoms who are hospitalized for reasons other than the virus.
Around 1,900 deaths are being announced each day, a 50 percent increase over the last two weeks.
Reports of new infections are up about 400 percent over the last two weeks in Alaska, Oregon and Utah.
With many people testing themselves on at-home tests, and other infections going undetected, reported cases are an undercount of actual infections, but indicate how the virus is spreading. Case trends help officials, businesses and residents assess risk and make decisions. Hospitalizations show strain on health care systems and can indicate the severity of recent infections.
The New York Times published county-specific guidance for common activities to help you lower your personal risk of getting Covid-19 and to help you protect your community. This advice was developed with public health experts at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies.
“Providing transparent, real time information about what people’s risks are is empowering,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, who is a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the president and C.E.O. of Resolve to Save Lives. “You want to know how hard it’s raining Covid.”