Hospital admissions up 63%, Omicron now 95% of U.S. COVID-19 cases
In a White House Briefing Tuesday, January 5, Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the current seven-day daily average of cases is about 491,700 cases per day, an increase of about 98 percent from the previous week.
In addition, the seven-day average of hospital admissions is about 14,800 per day, an increase of about 63 percent over the previous week. And the seven-day average of daily deaths are about 1,200 per day, which is an increase of about 5 percent over the prior week.
Wallensky continued, “Over the past month, we have seen the percentage of Omicron cases increase and the percentage of Delta cases decrease. Based on CDC genomic sequencing, we now estimate that Omicron represents about 95 % of cases in the country, and Delta represents the remaining 5 % of the cases. The sharp rise in cases and the emergence of the more transmissible Omicron variant emphasizes the importance of vaccinations and boosters.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the U.S. has had 57,649,131 confirmed cases and 832,061 confirmed deaths, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.
