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SALT LAKE CITY — The worst is yet to come for COVID-19 hospitalizations from the omicron surge, doctors with University of Utah Health warned Wednesday as the Utah Department of Health reported 12,564 new COVID-19 cases and 18 deaths.
The rolling, seven-day average for new cases has reached a new high of 10,967 per day, about 300 more than Tuesday's record. The average rate of tests resulting as positive is 41.6%, the health department said.
School-age children account for 2,330 new cases. Of those cases, 887 were children between ages 5 and 10, 552 were children 11-13, and 891 were children 14-17.
As of Tuesday, 715 patients across Utah were hospitalized with COVID-19, a new high for hospitalizations. Of those patients, 202 are in an ICU. Right now 88.7% of ICU beds are occupied, 92.1% of ICU referral beds, and 57% of non-ICU hospital beds, according to health officials.
Erin Clouse, strategic engagement manager at U. Health, said Utah is now at the point where hospitalizations are going up steeply. Hospitalizations, she said, typically lag a couple of weeks behind a rise in cases.
Now is the first time in the pandemic that hospitalizations have been consistently above 600, and Clouse said that daily hospital admission rates have also seen concerning increases. Despite this, intensive care unit beds have not yet seen the same trend.
Utah is on day 20 of the current omicron surge, with 20 days of steady increases in COVID-19 cases. Clouse said other areas have seen the omicron surge peak between 18 and 24 days.
"So there may be some hope on the horizon that case counts may start to come down. But the cases are still very, very high and hospitalizations will still continue to see increases over the next couple of weeks," she said.
Although this could be the case, Dr. Andrew Pavia, chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at U. Health, warned it could take longer because Utah's vaccination rates are not as high as most places that have passed the peak. He also said that it may be hard to see when the peak is here because the state has reached its testing capacity.
Pavia said the variant is "much more infectious" and that vaccinated people are more likely to catch omicron than the other variants, but there is still a high chance that vaccinated individuals will have a more manageable illness and he continues to encourage people to get vaccinated.
Among unvaccinated individuals, Pavia said there still is a reduction in the chance that they will be hospitalized with omicron compared to other variants, but over 80% of people currently hospitalized are unvaccinated.
"There's still a lot of severe disease occurring among people who are unvaccinated, and they shouldn't take too much comfort in the fact that (omicron is) somewhat less severe than delta because it's so much more infectious," Pavia said.
Utah health officials reported on Wednesday that in the last 28 days, Utahns who are not vaccinated are 12.5 times more likely to die from COVID-19, six times more likely to be hospitalized and 2.3 times more likely to test positive.
Some of the unvaccinated people who are hospitalized for COVID-19 include young children. Pavia said they have seen that the omicron variant has been impacting younger children in a way that the other variants of COVID-19 have not. He said children are ending up in the hospital with illness and that Primary Children's Hospital's census is higher than at any other point during the pandemic.
"Because of these massive numbers, omicron is having an impact on us; on you and me, on the health care system, on police, fire, emergency services, on stocking of grocery stores and clearing of streets, unlike anything we've seen throughout the pandemic. So we really shouldn't have any sense that this, because it is a little bit less severe, is not causing massive disruption," he said.
Pavia expects that things are still going to get worse in health care, even after case numbers fall.
For health care workers, the last two years have been "incredibly harrowing" and they are disheartened as there seems to be a sense that many people throughout the state don't care anymore, Pavia said. He asked people to wear high-quality masks for at least the next few weeks.
"There is long-term hope, but it is not time to let up. We absolutely need people to take it very seriously for the next, probably, two weeks. We need to continue masking in indoor places need to get more people vaccinated. Once we get past this next couple of weeks, our supplies of monoclonal antibody should improve, our supplies of oral antiviral drugs should improve (and) the number of health care workers who are back at work ... should improve.
"But now is not the time to let up or to get infected," Pavia said.
Russell Vinik, chief medical operations officer at University of Utah Health, said that there are some signs that the state his heading towards a plateau. He warned, however, that the positive test rate they have found among asymptomatic people who are not exposed was close to 12% in the last week which shows that the virus is spreading throughout the community.
"That's just a snapshot that about one in seven, one in eight people that you might come across in any given day likely has COVID and doesn't even know," Vinik said.
Because of that, he stressed that protective measures, like wearing a mask, is important.
Another trend that Vinik has seen in the last few weeks is that reinfections have gone up, and natural immunity is not as good at protecting a person from the omicron variant. Throughout the last year, U. Health recorded about five people who tested positive more than 90 days after another positive test each. Over the last few weeks, the number of reinfections in a week reached 185.
Vinik noted that although hospitalizations right now are higher than they have been during the pandemic, U. Health is seeing most of those patients in the acute care unit and they only have between 10 and 12 COVID-positive patients in the ICU.
The hardest thing for the health care system with the current surge in cases, Vinik said, is that with 12% of the community being COVID-19 positive there have been a lot of health care workers calling in sick and so there is less staff to help hospitals deal with the surge. Right now, he said, University of Utah Hospital is at 100% capacity despite cutting back on procedures that are not time-sensitive because of the amount of people who are in need of care and the lack of hospital staff who are able to work.
"Please don't let up. This is a big deal for us. Patients are not getting the care that they need," Vinik said. "It breaks our heart when we can't give a patient the care they need when they need it, but that's the situation we're in. And part of this can be prevented, so we need the public's help."
The Utah Department of Health reported that of the 18 people who died due to COVID, five are older than 85, nine are between 65 and 84, and the remaining four are between 45 and 64. Those deaths include:
- Two Salt Lake County men, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Weber County man, 45-64, hospitalized.
- A Washington County man, over 85, hospitalized.
- Three Washington County men, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Salt Lake County woman, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Utah County man, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Cache County woman, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Utah County man, over 85, hospitalized.
- A Weber County woman, 45-64, hospitalized.
- A Salt Lake County woman, over 85, long-term care facility resident.
- A Davis County man, over 85, hospitalized.
- A Uintah County woman, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Salt Lake County woman, 45-64, hospitalized.
- A Utah County woman, 65-84, hospitalized.
- A Weber County man, over 85, not hospitalized.
