The White House put out new data showing impressive differences between the death and hospitalization rates caused by omicron compared to previous variants.
In Michigan, according to the numbers, cases are not rising anymore and appear to be in a plateau. Based on what health officials are reporting for Southeast Michigan it’s more of a decrease than a plateau.
Statewide numbers are at a plateau because of other regions in the state. Some areas are still reporting increasing cases and it won’t be until they also peak out that we would see a more distinct drop in the statewide numbers.
Read: Michigan reports 27,423 new COVID cases, 379 deaths -- average of 13,712 cases per day
On a related note, we are now several weeks into the omicron spike and because death lags new cases we are at a point where we would expect deaths to increase more sharply, but so far health officials have not seen that. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky shed some light on that during a White House briefing on Wednesday.
“CDC released a new report that details the severity of omicron in comparison to other variants similar to our prior report, these data demonstrate that COVID-19 disease severity appears to be lower with the omicron variant than with prior variants,” Walensky said.
The bottom line is that omicron is still a serious problem and will continue to be as it burns across the United States.
Read: Complete Michigan COVID coverage