The number of COVID-19 patients at Concord Hospital has fallen by almost half in a week and the statewide figure is at the lowest point since mid-November, a hopeful sign in the two-year-old pandemic.
As of Wednesday morning, Concord had 24 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, a decline of almost on-half from the 43 last Thursday, according to Matthew Johnson, director of public affairs at the hospital.
On Tuesday, the state Department of Health and Human Services said there were 292 people in state hospitals with COVID-19. That’s the smallest number since Nov. 15, before the latest surge fueled by the Omicron variant began, and is about 25% lower than a week earlier.
The Omicron variant has proven extremely contagious, fueling enormous spikes in cases all over the world, but has caused serious disease and hospitalization much less often than earlier strains of the COVID-19 virus, especially among people who are vaccinated and boosted. This has led some countries, including Britain, France and Norway, to reduce or remove public restrictions like mask-wearing or limits of public gatherings.
While this relaxation is welcome news to a weary public, the World Health Organization is warning that the long-term effects of the virus on individuals and society should not be underestimated.
“We are concerned that a narrative has taken hold in some countries that because of vaccines … preventing transmission is no longer possible and no longer necessary,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Gheybreysus said at a briefing Tuesday. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
China, which has sought to completely eliminate COVID-19, is clamping down on public restrictions due to a small number of Omicron-related cases emerging in Beijing, where the Winter Olympics is being held, and elsewhere.
The Omicron variant often infects cells in the nose and throat rather than tissue deep in the lungs that can generate some of the most severe symptoms. So even though the variant has ripped through New Hampshire, hospitalizations have not increased as quickly.
Richard Levitan, an emergency room physician at Littleton Regional Hospital, said even though new cases are high as they’ve ever been in New Hampshire, the ER is quiet. “The people we have in the hospital are the leftovers from Delta,” he said. “If anybody gets really sick from Omicron, we’re not seeing it.”
In New Hampshire, the number of new cases reported to officials has fallen in the past week, although that data does not include home tests and may not completely reflect the status of the virus.
Deaths in the state related to COVID-19 have not fallen much recently, however. In past surges, new cases and then hospitalizations have declined before the number of fatalities has declined, an indication of how disease progresses through the community.
