The explosive increase in U.S. coronavirus case counts is raising alarm, but some experts believe the focus should instead be on COVID-19 hospital admissions. And those aren’t climbing as fast.
Public health experts suspect that those numbers, taken together, reflect the vaccine’s continued effectiveness at preventing serious illness, even against omicron, as well as the possibility that the variant does not make most people as sick as earlier versions.
Instead, she said, the U.S. at this stage of the pandemic should be “shifting our focus, especially in an era of vaccination, to really focus on preventing illness, disability and death, and therefore counting those.” The daily case counts are also subject to wild swings. The number of new cases recorded on Monday topped 1 million, a figure that may reflect a backlog held up by reporting delays over the holiday weekend. The seven-day rolling average is considered more reliable.
Case counts have lost relevance, said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine. Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said that for each new infection detected, the U.S. is missing two cases. But he said tracking the number of positive test results is still important as omicron makes its way across the land.
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