50 States of CDC COVID-19 Hospitalization Data

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is still publishing a weekly COVIDView report that makes the United States look as if it’s beaten COVID-19.

The CDC is also posting a separate set of maps and charts, which is not included in the COVIDView reports, that shows that people with COVID-19 are filling a huge number, and percentage, of the hospital beds in states like Arizona, Georgia and Texas.

Resources

• The CDC’s weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
• The CDC’s COVID-19 hospital capacity reports are available here.
• An overview article about the weekly COVID-19 report for the previous week is available here.

To cope with problems with COVID-19 testing, the CDC uses a map showing what’s happening with “influenza-like illnesses” out in the community, at primary care offices, urgent care clinics and hospital emergency rooms.

The idea is that the activity level for true influenza is very low right now, and typical early cases of COVID-19 look enough like the flu for the same tracking map to work for both flu and COVID-19.

But, at this point, the COVIDView tracking map seems to be broken: It’s continuing to show, as it has for weeks, that all states are reporting a very low, or minimal, number of new flu-like (or COVID-19-like) cases out in the community.

Another, separate website,  a hospital capacity snapshot website, is telling a different story.

The hospital capacity map there shows that, as of July 10, patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 were filling at least 10% of all inpatient hospital beds in nine states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, South Carolina and Texas

Single-state charts for those states shows that the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 bottomed out there sometime in May or June, then started to shoot up around mid-June.

The U.S. COVID-19 map tells a similar, quieter story: The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 bottomed out in mid-June and has started to increase.

New York state had a very severe COVID-19 outbreak in April. Including the New York state numbers, overall U.S. COVID-19 hospitalization numbers are still lower than they were in April. But, excluding the New York state numbers, overall U.S. COVID-19 hospitalization numbers are now about as high as they were in April.

In Arizona, for example, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 was holding steady at around 1,000 and now has increased to more than 3,000 in the latest data.

The percentage of beds occupied by people with COVID-19 is changing, because the hardest-hit states are taking emergency steps to increase the number of beds available. But, as of July 7, the percentage of beds occupied by patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 ranged from 1.1%, in Hawaii, up to about 24%, in Arizona, with a median of about 3.9%.

For a look at the percentage, for each state, of inpatient hospital beds filled with patients with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, as of July 7, see the table below.

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— Read 7 Reasons the U.S. COVID-19 Picture Is So Fuzzy, on ThinkAdvisor.

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