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Another take on Florida...

>While COVID-19’s omicron variant pushes Florida to pandemic daily records in cases reported and has drive-thru testing lines snaking through parks and pharmacy parking lots, hospitalizations haven’t risen at the same rate — yet. Sunday’s report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said there were 2,302 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in Florida. That’s 39 more people hospitalized than in Saturday’s report and from 245 hospitals, as opposed to the 246 hospitals in Saturday’s report. COVID-19 patients occupy 4.27% of patient beds in those reporting hospitals, compared to 4.18% in the previous day’s reporting hospitals. Of the people hospitalized in Florida, 333 were in intensive care unit beds, a decrease of nine. That represents about 5.41% of the state’s ICU hospital beds, compared to 5.55% the previous day.

> Florida's 300% rise in cases this past week has demonstrated that natural-immunity from Alpha/Delta was completely worthless vs Omicron. Florida is well on its way to having a worse surge than it ever had before. It doesn't seem like we can natural-immunity our ways out of this.

Tangential, but has Florida started accurately reporting their cases, hospitalizations and deaths instead of under-reporting them?

> Tangential, but has Florida started accurately reporting their cases, hospitalizations and deaths instead of under-reporting them?

Doesn't matter IMO. What matters is the change-in-percent. If Florida's "undercount" is 300% higher this week than last week, that's all the evidence we need, as long as the "undercount" remained consistent.

The exact number isn't important. Its the change in numbers we can look at and rely upon. If you don't trust the numbers, you can still trust the change-in-numbers.

Its not important to get exact numbers. Its more important to remain consistent in your reporting through these crisis. We care about apples-to-apples comparisons within the state, not against different states. A 300% rise is a 300% rise.

I agree that you can glean trends from inaccurately reported data, but I'm asking because I want to know if there is a source that is attempting accurate reporting in Florida, or if Florida is counting things differently than they were a while ago.

Any state with more than 5% positive is underreporting cases however.

You need 95% of your cases to be negative if you expect any accuracy in your case%. If you're at 10% positive or 15% positive, then if you double your testing, you double your cases.

10% positive suggests a testing-kit shortage. That's what's going on in my state, we've begun to ration testing-kits. We only give out testing kits to those with symptoms.

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At some point, your hospital systems favor the individual's health over accurate reporting of statistics. Under such circumstances, it becomes important to use alternative measures for how bad the surge is. Focusing on "% change" is one of the most effective ways of factoring in this issue.

I don't really get why the positive test rate is not supposed to have gone up significantly with availability of at home tests. Shortages of at home tests would naturally lower it again, but isn't this a useless number now that we don't know how many people used tests they already had at home to skip being in the negative reported results?

> Tangential, but has Florida started accurately reporting their cases, hospitalizations and deaths instead of under-reporting them?

AFAIK, the only underreporting they are doing is not counting positive tests as cases unless the person is a permanent Florida resident, while everyone else is counting tests conducted in-state. Which is significant, but really only effects the case count.

(They may be doing a bad job of actually doing testing, too, but that’s not underreporting though it has a similar effect. But, again AFAIK, hospitalization and death numbers aren’t impacted.)

They also changed to attributing deaths to the date they occurred, rather than the date they were recorded. Because this gap can be days or even weeks, it raises the death curve mostly in past periods, and therefore gives the impression the rate is always declining.

> Elsewhere in the country... Florida's 300% rise in cases this past week has demonstrated that natural-immunity from Alpha/Delta was completely worthless vs Omicron.

This is simply wrong. A rise in cases is not evidence of much of anything related to immunity, let alone natural immunity. Plenty of vaccinated people are getting infected as well -- they're not dying from it.

> Florida is well on its way to having a worse surge than it ever had before. It doesn't seem like we can natural-immunity our ways out of this.

Please stop speculating. The "surge" in cases is currently lower than what happened in FL over the summer, and hospitalizations are flat:

https://covid-19.direct/state/12

Curious which state you're in.

> This means that 20% of surgeries are going to be cancelled > We're at 90% adults vaccinated, but "70% to 80%" of the hospitalizations are unvaccinated individuals > our surge is already exceeding Winter-2020 levels

Can you put any links to the data on any of these? I am really curious to know where you get that from, I can't find any hospitalization data from Omicron and vaccinated rates on those hospitalizations.

The first hospital to declare an emergency in my state was...

https://www.umms.org/uch/news/2021/um-uch-moves-to-crisis-st...

The 70% to 80% quote is from local-TV stations.

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/um-upper-chesapeake-hospital-...

> Barrueto said 70% to 80% of the hospitals' patients are unvaccinated. He said the move also sends a message to the community that it's not business as usual.

I think when the dust settles, we'll conclude that Omicron for the vaccinated posed very similar risks as the flu. Keyword of course is for the vaccinated. SF is seeing the highest case counts at any point in the pandemic and yet there is no real change in hospitalizations/deaths.

Anecdotally, I've attended two mega indoor concerts in the past couple of months. It is almost impossible that I haven't been exposed to or contracted COVID.

> Keyword of course is for the vaccinated. SF is seeing the highest case counts at any point in the pandemic and yet there is no real change in hospitalizations/deaths.

It took about a week or two between our Omicron-surge before our hospitals filled up around here. COVID19 is a slow-moving disease, give it some time and prepare.

What's the vaccination rate in your county?

61.8% of total population. Lower than the state's average but still pretty good by American standards.

Ah. SF is at 87% with at least one dose and 80% with at least 2 doses.

I think 62% vs. 80% could be a big enough delta to explain the difference here versus your town.

Thanks for the additional data-point. That 18% difference could very well make the difference.

I'll be keeping an eye on your higher-vaccination rate and how it works out in your city. I've been trying to tell my coworkers / people around me to get vaccinated (and boostered) but not everybody would listen.

EDIT: The state's average is like 80% total population. I live in an area with far below the state's average in regards to vaccinations.

To clarify, there's a lag for hospitalizations, and then there is another lag for deaths. COVID can even take a couple of months to kill from the initial infection if the infected person is being kept alive on a ventilator.

So there are 9 times as many vaccinated people and 3 times fewer hospitalizations, that would be 1-1/27 efficacy (96% or so). Sounds like it's no worse, or possibly even better, than what was measured in the trials

>"Omicron has been a bitch so far. It seems like it is causing hospitalizations in the unvaccinated population, maybe not at the same "rate" as Delta, but in high enough numbers that we're going to run out of hospital beds in my area. "

One of the problems seems to be that hospital staff are so expensive (because of their regulated monopoly) that we've been running with no spare capacity in normal times. Most other systems have 20% or more extra capacity.

We've literally never run out of hospital space before, including the 2020 winter surge of COVID19/Alpha (which hit us harder than Delta did).

This Omicron is worse than anything we've seen before locally. Crisis levels / Emergency levels of hospitalization have been reached.

Yeah, we've had a nursing crisis and our health care system is shoddier than many people realize. But Omicron is clearly different.

I agree with everything you say here, but most other systems (outside of healthcare and hospitals in particular) run with greater than 20% spare capacity. For example, your local pizza restaurant can probably produce 20% above their expected volume tonight if needed.

I mean, some hospitals in my area are reportedly at 140% stated capacity or something.

We're well above "20%". This is crisis / emergency time. The emergency declaration will reduce surgeries by 20% (going from 140% capacity to 112% capacity).

Like, its obviously not enough, but... its something.

> Most other systems have 20% or more extra capacity.

I think it's been fairly clear in the pandemic that they don't.

I was talking about other systems like HVAC, or computers, or any other system you can think of. I was not comparing one specific healthcare system to another.