U.S. Hospitals’ Weekly COVID-19 Death Count Rises Again

Start Slideshow

U.S. COVID-19 surge figures still look terrible.

Hospital-reported COVID deaths of people of all ages increased to 935, or 30% more than the total reported the previous week, according to data reported by hospitals to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Excluding weeks when spurts of data from Iowa threw off the counts, it’s the worst figure since  early February 2023.

What it means: The latest numbers are not nearly as bad as the numbers reported during the worst weeks of the COVID pandemic, but they mean “endemic COVID” is still a big problem.

Working-age hospitalizations: The number of COVID hospitalizations of people ages 20 through 59 was 5,045, according to the HHS data.

That was down 10% from the previous week, but it means the count has been over 5,000 for seven straight weeks, since the week ending Dec. 16, 2023.

Previously, the count had been below 5,000, and usually below 3,500, every week from early March 2023.

About 22% of the adults hospitalized for COVID in the latest week were ages 20 through 59.

Rough 4% of all people admitted to U.S. hospitals with COVID are dying.

For a look at the five states with the highest working-age hospitalization counts, along with a chart showing how hospital-reported death counts have changed since January 2023, see the gallery above.

For data on all 50 states and some other jurisdictions, see the table below.

Total U.S. deaths: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses very early all-cause mortality counts to measure the impact of infectious disease control outbreaks.

The counts appear to be suffering from severe data lag.

The reasonably complete counts available for the first weeks of the year show that the country is averaging about 57,000 deaths of people of all ages from all causes per week, or about 21% more than it was during the comparable period in 2019, before COVID came to light.

Credit: Shutterstock

Start Slideshow