The rate of hospitalizations of Americans with COVID-19 has dropped 50% amid the new Omicron variant compared to record highs seen a year ago, new data shows.
Even though the rate of cases has has more than tripled in just a few weeks since Omicron emerged — earlier this week there were more than 1 million new cases diagnosed in a single day — just 3% of people with the virus are being admitted in hospitals, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows.
That rate is less than half the 6.5% of cases that needed hospitalization exactly a year ago, when the average daily case count was about 250,000, the data shows. Deaths from the virus are less than a third of what was recorded last January at about 1,200 per day, far fewer than the record high of 3,400 a year ago, CDC data shows.
