Allegheny County & Pennsylvania #covid hospitalization & variants thread for 2022-09-07

Allegheny County

Allegheny reports 1771 new cases over 7 days.
Hospitalizations are -6 to 204
ICUs are +13 to 32 (74% full)
7 day avg drops to 253 cases/day
Transmission risk: High
CDC Community level: Medium

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania reports 16909 new cases over 7 days.
Hospitalizations are -87 to 1171
ICUs are +0 to 146 (79% full)
7 day avg drops to 2354 cases/day
Transmission risk: High

Vaccinations

Allegheny County daily vaccines move to 240 1st+2nd doses, 60 booster doses/day (5 day lagged 7 day avg; this is before updated boosters)

Fully vaccinated %s:

(No updates for today from last week; dashboard hasn't updated yet)

Hospitalizations

PA counties with full ICU beds due to covid:
Adams (1 +covid patient in ICU),
Clearfield (2)
Bradford (2)
Lawrence (2)

PA-wide hospital census: Using 17053 med/surg beds, 555 less than last week, 549 less than 2 weeks ago.

Commentary

The tea leaves are a bit tricky to read for Allegheny County. Statewide, the drop in hospitalizations looks encouraging. For a while, cases were nominally dropping but hospitalizations kept growing, but perhaps this most recent dip is an actual drop in cases. Allegheny needs a bit more data to say much but is a bit down if you squint enough. Cases have been dropping quite rapidly so we'd expect next week's hospitalization data to show it.

We won't see any effects from bivalent boosters in any numbers yet, but may start seeing effects as soon as next week (but probably the week after), depending on how fast uptake is, but I suspect it'll be a bit more gradual, and we have school resuming adding extra noise.

Bivalent boosters now available from most major pharmacies and the Pitt Covax center (available to everyone). Get 'em while they're hot if you're 3+ months out from your previous one.