COVID-19 Hospitalizations Are Up Over 1,000% in These Counties

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 19, 9:30AM EST

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COVID-19 Hospitalizations Are Up Over 1,000% in These Counties — © Octavio Passos / Getty Images News via Getty Images

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread more aggressively in the past month than in any time since the first infections were detected in January 2020. Cases have started to rise at the rate of almost a million a day. Over 150,000 Americans are in hospitals. The death rate per day is nearly 2,000.
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Because the Omicron variant of the disease appears to send fewer people to the hospital per 100,000 people infected, and the death rates seem to be lower, many experts believe the best measure of the damage of the disease to public health is hospitalizations. Not all experts agree with this assessment. According to the Inquirer:

Using the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 to gauge the severity of the pandemic may not give an accurate picture in the Omicron era as more and more patients with the virus are being admitted for other reasons, some scientists have said.

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Nevertheless, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) believes the hospitalization data is important enough that it tracks this data via its Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)-Associated Hospitalization Surveillance Network (COVID-NET). Among the information provided by this tracking by the patient is age, sex, date of admission, medical history and outcome.

COVID-19 hospitalizations nationwide number 47 per 100,000 people, based on a seven-day average. Over the past 14 days, this figure has risen 54%.

In many states and counties, the increase in hospitalization is much higher than the national figure. The state with the highest growth rate is Alabama, where the figure is up 144%, followed by Louisiana with a 120% increase.

Some counties have posted hospitalization increases of over 1,000%. These are all in the South. This list is currently topped by St. John the Baptist in Louisiana, where the rise is 1,513%, according to The New York Times.

Next on the list, Oktibbeha, Mississippi, is up 1,303%, then Escambia, Alabama, (1,269%); Winn, Louisiana, (1,268%); and Coffee, Georgia (1,223%). Another 25 counties have posted increases of over 500% in hospitalization over the same period.

Click here to see which is the deadliest state due to COVID-19.
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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.