The number of Americans being admitted to hospital with Covid are climbing, sitting at 20 538 per week, according to US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.
Additionally, 2.3% of all deaths last week were linked to Covid-19.
However, reports ABC News, these figures are still relatively low overall compared with the peak of the Omicron wave in 2021-22, when weekly hospitalisations hit 150 674 in the week of 15 January 2022.
At the same period throughout the pandemic (September), weekly hospitalisations sat at 24 504 in 2020, 80 166 in 2021 and 31 571 in 2022.
Dr Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California-San Francisco, said the rising figures were “a siren call for the winter, when we have other things that cause people to go to hospital as well”.
He said with other viruses, including flu and RSV, expected to increase, the healthcare system could be strained if Covid hospitalisations continued to spiral.
The slight surge comes as an updated Covid vaccine for everyone aged six months and older becomes more available across the country.
The newest jabs, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are formulated to target variants currently circulating, which are related to XBB – an offshoot of the Omicron variant.
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