COVID Map Shows 4 States With Highest Hospital Cases

Four states were among those with the highest totals of hospital admissions with coronavirus in the latest recorded week, maps from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show.

California, Florida, New York and Texas all had more than a thousand hospitalizations with the virus in the week ending January 27, figures posted on Friday reveal.

However, the four states are also the most populous, and so are likely to have a higher total number of hospital admissions even if the rate of hospitalizations is similar to that in other states.

When adjusted for population sizes, all but two states had low hospital admission rates of less than 10 per 100,000 people, including the four with the highest totals. Only New Jersey and Connecticut had rates per 100,000 people of more than 10.

Overall, there were 22,636 new hospitalizations with COVID-19 across the U.S. in the latest recorded week—a decline of 10.9 percent on the previous week. Many states' week-on-week changes in hospitalizations were considered "stable" if not decreasing. The only state which had seen a moderate increase, of 17.9 percent, was Vermont.

It comes after a rise in cases early on in the winter, which now appears to have peaked. After steadily increasing since early November, hospital admissions topped out at nearly 35,000 in the final week of December and the first week of January, and have been falling since.

This winter has also seen early rises in other respiratory viruses, including the flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Elevated infections of respiratory diseases led some hospitals in areas with large populations to bring in fresh mask mandates.

The uptick in hospitalizations is something health officials expected during the winter months. Colder weather tends to lead to an increased spread of viruses and other infections because immunity is lower.

The latest figures show that, in the week ending January 27, California had the highest total hospital admissions with the virus, of 2,496. It was followed by Florida, with 1,988, New York with 1,879 and Texas with 1,883.

All other states had 930 hospitalizations or less, with some seeing less than 59.

While the number of cases in some states might seem startling, they often represent a relatively low number of hospital admissions. In California, there have been nearly 659,000 people hospitalized with COVID since August 2020.

At the same time, states in the Great Lakes, Southeast, and South Central U.S., as well as New York and New Jersey, saw an elevated proportion of COVID tests returning positive results, while other regions had test positivity rates of less than 10 percent of those taken.

Two CDC administrative regions—encompassing New York and New Jersey; and Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas—had an overall test positivity rate of 12 percent or more.