COVID Map Shows 12 States With Most New Hospital Admissions

Twelve U.S. states have had a moderate or substantial increase in coronavirus hospitalizations in the latest recorded week, new figures show.

While there were nearly 19,700 new admissions with the virus across the U.S. in the week ending September 16, an overall decline of 4.3 percent on the previous week, in five states they have risen by more than 20 percent. In others, however, they have fallen, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Monday.

Hospitalizations with COVID-19 had been rising since late June, before seemingly peaking at the start of September, but remain well below the highest recorded peak of over 150,600 patients in the week ending January 15, 2021.

The localized rises come as some private institutions, hospital operators, and colleges in the U.S. have reintroduced the requirements for staff or visitors to wear masks while at their sites to limit the spread of the new variants—EG.5 and BA.2.86.

As of September 15, the CDC said that the latter variant "does not appear to be rapidly increasing or driving increases in infections or hospitalizations," in the U.S., and that existing antibodies were giving individuals immunity against the new strain.

A spokesperson for the agency told Newsweek that its genomic surveillance indicated that the majority of infections were being caused "by strains closely related to the Omicron strains" circulating since early 2022.

The latest figures show the states that have seen the most rapid rise in cases requiring medical treatment were Montana and Wisconsin, both of which have seen increases approaching 30 percent more.

The greatest rise was in New Hampshire, at 52 percent. Other states with a more than 20 percent increase in hospitalizations were North Dakota, Nebraska and Maine.

States that saw an increase of between 10 and 20 percent were Washington state, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio. Many states and territories are deemed to have a stable number of hospital admissions with COVID-19 by the CDC, or are seeing a decline in cases.

While the rapidity of the increases in some states may be startling, this may be because they represent a relatively low number of hospital admissions. In New Hampshire, there were just 76 hospitalizations in a week, out of a total of more than 18,200 since August 2020.

Nationwide, there has been just a 0.1 percent rise in the number of patients occupying intensive-care-unit beds with COVID-19, representing the worst cases, which usually require ventilation.

Though the number of deaths with the virus has been steadily rising since July—to 1,002 deaths recorded in the week to September 2—provisional data suggests this total is now falling, and is far below the highest peaks of the pandemic. The greatest number of weekly recorded deaths, nearly 26,000, came in the first week of January 2021.

"While rates now seem to be plateauing, we are entering October, which is the typical start of the respiratory virus season," a CDC spokesperson said. "Even if hospitalization rates level off for a few weeks, they could increase in the coming weeks, and prevention is the best approach.

"CDC's guidance for individual and community actions around COVID-19 are tied to hospital admission levels, which are currently low for over 89 percent of the country."

Update 9/27/23, 12:22 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from a CDC spokesperson.