The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that hospitalizations due to Covid-19 increased by about 33 percent last week and deaths by about 40 percent.
CDC President Rochelle Walensky said that the cases under the influence of the Omicron variant in the USA are expected to peak in the coming weeks.
“This increase is largely due to the Omicron variant, which currently represents about 90 percent of COVID-19 cases in the country,” Walensky told reporters.
Hospitalizations have been on the rise since late December, when Omicron overtook the Delta variant as the dominant strain in the US, although experts say it will likely be less deadly than previous variants.
Walensky said the latest increase in casualties was a lagging effect of the Delta variant, which rose before the Omicron appeared in the US in December.
With Delta and other previous variants, casualties affected infection rates with a delay of several weeks.
“We may see deaths from Omicron, but I suspect the deaths we are seeing now are still from Delta,” Walensky said, noting that it will take time to understand how Omicron affects the overall loss of life from the Corona virus.
On the other hand, according to the latest estimate of the CDC, more than 62,000 people may die from Covid-19 in the next four weeks.
The CDC predicted that the death toll will rise steadily for four weeks.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the Corona virus caused the death of more than 842,000 people in the USA.
According to JHU data, the CDC’s estimate could increase the average death toll from 1,715 per day to over 2,600.
According to the data of the US Department of Health, the number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 is currently around 146 thousand.