COVID-19: This State Has the Fewest People in Hospitals

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jul 26, 10:17AM EDT · Published Jul 25, 9:29AM EDT

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COVID-19: This State Has the Fewest People in Hospitals — © dougtone / Flickr

It is easy to forget how terrible the spread of COVID-19 has been in America. The headlines more recently have focused on outbreaks in Brazil, India and Indonesia. However, there have been 34,462,236 confirmed cases in the United States, which is 18% of the global total. Fatal cases in America number 616,040, or about 15% of the world’s total.

The rate of COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States has slowed considerably. Nationwide, 60% of people 18 years or older are vaccinated. However, millions of people have refused. In some states, as many as half of the residents fall into this category. This is particularly true in some southern states. Only 43% of the people 18 years or older have been fully vaccinated in Mississippi. Other states on the low vaccination list include Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee.

The vaccination problem has been exacerbated by the recent very rapid spread of the Delta variant. This variant spreads more than 50% faster than the version of the disease most prevalent in the United States through 2020 and early 2021. Unvaccinated Americans have been put at additional risk because of this much higher infection rate.

Lack of vaccination and the spread of the Delta variant has led to fears that hospitals will begin to overflow with those seriously affected by COVID0-19. This already has begun to happen in Florida and Missouri.

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When public health officials and the media look at the spread of the disease, they tend to focus on three numbers–cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. To make comparisons of these from state to state and from county to county they use a “per 100,000” calculation. This allows experts to compare places with small populations to those which are larger in number.

Currently, the state with the lowest number of hospitalization per 100,000 residents based on a seven-day average is Vermont at less than one. Its figure is 29. This compares to a nationwide average of nine.

Click here to see in which states the most people have been vaccinated.
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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.