COVID-19: The County With the Fewest People in the Hospital

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 3, 10:30AM EDT

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COVID-19: The County With the Fewest People in the Hospital — © DenisTangneyJr / Getty Images

As the COVID-19 Delta variant surges across the United States, two factors are the best protection against it: vaccination and mask-wearing. In some states, there is absolutely no mandate to wear masks. In others, vaccination rates are extremely low. In one state, both factors have caused a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases. Recently, one in five new cases across the country has been in Florida. In another state, almost no one is in the hospital due to a COVID-19 infection.

It is easy to forget how badly COVID-19 has savaged the United States since January 2020. Officially, America has had 35,039,644 confirmed cases, which is about 18% of the world total, despite large surges in high population countries such as Brazil, India and Indonesia. The number of U.S. fatal cases is 618,197, or about 15% of the global figure. Most of the cases came in waves. The first was in April of last year. Another occurred in late summer, and the worst just after the December holidays. A fourth wave apparently has started, and it has been particularly brutal in states with low vaccination rates, several of which have rates of little more than 40%. In some other states, the vaccination rates are above 60%.

The most critical measure of the rise in cases and deaths is hospitalizations. This figure is increasing particularly fast in states and counties with low vaccination rates. Public health officials trace cases, deaths and hospitalizations by 100,000, which allows comparisons of large counties and states with those that are much smaller.
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In Vermont, the hospitalization rate is below one per 100,000. Seven counties have rates that low. They are Addison, Bennington, Chittenden, Franklin, Lamoille, Orleans and Windham. In Chittenden, Franklin and Lamoille, the rates have dropped 45% in the past 14 days. In another, Caledonia, cases have been less than 1 per 100,000 as measured over the past seven days. There have been no COVID-19 deaths in the state over the past seven days.

Click here to read about the county where COVID-19 hospitalizations are up nearly 600%.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.