The latest coronavirus wave that has affected most of the United States is showing signs of improvement in the Northeast.
More than 29,000 people are hospitalized with covid-19 across the country, an increase of 16% over the past two weeks, and more than 3,000 of those patients are in intensive care. But in Northeastern states, hospitalizations have been declining.
In Vermont, numbers have dropped by more than 40% over the past two weeks. They declined more than 20% in Massachusetts and roughly 10% in Maine, Connecticut and New York.
Every other region is seeing a rise in hospitalizations, particularly so in Alabama and Louisiana, where hospitalizations have risen by at least 70%.
Hospitalizations tend to be a more reliable indicator than caseloads, which could be significantly undercounted as Americans turn more to at-home tests that go unreported to county health officials. Case counts may also have been affected by reporting delays over the Memorial Day weekend.
Angela Rasmussen, a virus expert at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, said, "A patchwork of rising cases and the impact will depend on vaccination rates, demographics and the availability of health care."
Dr. Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the situation would most likely improve over the summer but that another wave of cases could be expected after that.
WORRY OVER GATHERINGS
Meanwhile, there are initial signs that California's latest wave of coronavirus cases may be slowing. It's still possible that gatherings from the Memorial Day weekend and during the summer will worsen transmission levels.
California reported an average of 13,800 new coronavirus cases a day over the past week, according to data released Friday, down 12% from the previous week. That's 247 cases a week for every 100,000 residents.
The trend is the first week-over-week decrease in cases in two months.
Some experts note that test positivity rates are still rising. San Francisco's is more than 12%, while the rate in Los Angeles County is 5%.
In Los Angeles County, no sewer systems reported a doubling of coronavirus levels in the last week, County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a recent briefing.
The county reported a 9% decrease in average daily coronavirus cases, according to a Times analysis of data released Friday, with the case rate falling from about 4,600 cases a day to 4,200.
Elsewhere in California, the Bay Area still has the highest case rate, with 317 cases a week for every 100,000 residents.
Coronavirus-positive hospitalizations are still increasing statewide.
Covid-19 is making up a growing percentage of the reasons why people in Los Angeles County are seeking care at emergency rooms. About 6% of ER visits in the past week are related to the coronavirus.
Some doctors have said many coronavirus-positive patients are not being treated for covid-19 illnesses and their infection status is incidental to why they're in the hospital.
Nonetheless, Ferrer said increasing numbers of coronavirus-positive patients will eventually strain hospital systems because of the additional resources needed.
That's why she has warned that, should worsening hospitalization trends hold, Los Angeles County could reimpose a universal mask mandate in indoor public settings. But Ferrer also has expressed hope that the county could avoid that measure if people take steps to reduce infections and transmission.
Other promising trends include a reduction in the number of weekly outbreaks at nursing homes, from 21 to 14 a week as of the last week of May, according to Ferrer.
Information for this article was contributed by Jesus Jimenez of The New York Times and by Rong-Gong Lin II of the Los Angeles Times (TNS).