Our view Daily COVID counts are still critical information
For nearly two years state health officials and the media have dutifully reported daily COVID-19 figures, primarily new cases and deaths. Except for several weeks last summer, the state health department reported 1,000 new cases or more per day most of last year.
Even before the omicron variant raised statewide daily case counts into five figures, the question had arisen: Should there be so much focus on the counts? Maybe it's not so important how many are getting COVID-19 anymore; maybe the focus should be on only hospitalizations and deaths.
We disagree. The new-case count still matters because of the hospitalizations that spin off those cases - even though with the rise of at-home tests it's likely there's an undercount.
There's talk of COVID-19 becoming endemic, especially now with omicron. Maybe a 20,000-case tally isn't what it used to be.
Yet, compare COVID to influenza. The CDC estimates there were 35 million flu cases in 2019-2020, which resulted in 380,000 hospitalizations, or a little more than 1%.
From August 2020 to now, more than 53 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported, the CDC data shows, and nearly 3.8 million hospitalizations. That's about 7%.
The numbers matter. They provide valuable data to the people studying the pandemic; they provide immediately information to local hospitals making game-time decisions about how to staff and plan.
If you are positive from an at-home test, report it to your doctor, whether you need hospitalization or not. Hopefully, not.
If you don't understand why hospitals are so dependent on those daily counts, think of this: With more than 100,000 new COVID cases reported statewide per week - and closer to 200,000 last week - there are 31,544 hospital beds in the state, Illinois Department of Public Health figures show.
Seven percent of 200,000 is 14,000.
Moreover there are only 2,978 ICU beds in the state for all 12.7 million residents. And not everybody who needs an ICU bed is a COVID patient - people still have strokes and car accidents, and fall off their roofs taking down Christmas lights.
During most of the pandemic, between 1,400 and 2,200 ICU beds have been regularly used for non-COVID reasons, according to IDPH data. So when COVID-19 patients take up 1,000 or more ICU beds at one time, it's a big deal. A single disease is taking up one-third of the state's ICU beds. Last week, less than 10% of ICU beds were open.
COVID is still taking a disproportionate number of hospital beds and lives. That's why those new-case counts matter.