Hospital admissions for COVID-19 patients in the United States are declining for the first time since late June, suggesting the latest surge has peaked.
The seven-day average of new daily hospitalizations with confirmed COVID-19 dropped by 2.4 percent from a week earlier to about 12,280—the first such drop since around June 27, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It comes as fewer hospitalizations are being reported in Florida, Texas, and other Southern states, the agency said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 tracker shows that the seven-day average for both deaths and cases appears to be leveling out. Previous surges of cases—including in the spring of 2020, in late July to early August 2020, and January 2021—always leveled out and then dropped.
According to the CDC’s latest data, about 74.4 percent of all U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
A new study published in Nature last week revealed that about one-third of all Americans, or more than 100 million people, had likely been infected with COVID-19 by the end of 2020. Officially, about 19.6 million cases of the virus were confirmed across the country.
“There are still more people susceptible than we had believed,” Dr. Jill Foster, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said in the report. “If the pattern continues where the Delta variant infects a significant portion of those vaccinated, the number of people susceptible rises even higher than was predicted.”