More US states are at or near all-time peak Covid hospitalization levels

Maryland and the District of Columbia are the latest to see all-time high hospitalization levels from Covid-19 — at a time when about 10 states are experiencing some of the highest hospitalization numbers of the pandemic.

According to data from the US Department of Health and Human Services, Maryland currently has 2,197 Covid-19 patients in the hospital, up 32% from just a week ago, topping the record previously set in January.

Washington, DC, has 514 Covid-19 cases in the hospital, more than double the number a week ago, and a far higher number than during any previous pandemic peak. 

Ohio hospitalizations, 5,609, are nearly tied with the state’s all-time record of 5,759 in December 2020.

Four other states — Connecticut, Indiana, Missouri and Delaware — are all seeing hospital numbers at least 80% as high as their all-time records last winter, according to a CNN analysis of HHS data.

And four states — Michigan, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire — hit their all-time pandemic peak hospitalization numbers this month, according to a CNN review of the data, though all four have seen hospitalizations decline in the last few days.

Here’s a look at how 2021 US Covid-19 hospitalizations compare to 2020:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said there are no plans to further scale back or cancel the city’s big New Years’ Eve celebration, as the current precautions were approved by the city’s health leadership. He also emphasized that it’s crucial to hold the event “to send a message to the world, New York City is open.”

The mayor previously announced that the size of the event will be reduced, and the city will require masks on top of a previous requirement that everyone be vaccinated. 

As the celebration is quickly approaching, de Blasio also attempted to assuage concerns over emergency services staffing, saying that while workers are calling out sick, most are experiencing mild illness.

“We have the ability to weather this for sure,” de Blasio said.

He lauded the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance to shorten the recommended isolation time for people who’ve tested positive for Covid-19 from 10 days to five days if they don’t have symptoms.

“We want everyone to be healthy, but what we are seeing is very mild illnesses, thank God, [and] after five days, people coming right back on,” de Blasio said.  

Currently, 30% of EMS workers and 17% of firefighters are on medical leave – compared to the 25% of EMS workers on medical leave in March and April of 2020, according to the FDNY. 

Some members are out sick with Covid-19, there are others who have symptoms but have not yet confirmed diagnosis, and others who are just sick in general, they said.

The new year also brings the end of de Blasio’s administration.

CNN’s Laura Ly contributed to this post.

JetBlue Airways is reducing its schedule by about 1,280 flights starting today through Jan. 13 because a growing number of crew members are getting infected with Covid-19.

The 1,280 flights amount to about 10% of JetBlue’s schedule.

Airlines have canceled hundreds of flights every day in the United States since Christmas Eve as they grapple with staff shortages due to Covid-19 infections and bad weather in parts of the country. JetBlue is based in New York, which reported a new record high of 67,000 positive cases on Tuesday.

More than 1,000 flights have been canceled within, into or out of the US as of Thursday, according to FlightAware. JetBlue canceled 17% of its flights Thursday with another 4% flights delayed.

Spanish National Police have seized about 300,000 Covid-19 antigen tests from warehouses near Madrid on suspicion that they may not comply with established health procedures, the police said in a statement Thursday. 

Dozens of police officers converged on Wednesday on five warehouses in the southern Madrid suburb of Fuenlabrada and inspected 1 million packaged antigen tests, seizing 300,000 of them, according to the statement and the national police press office for Madrid.

The police suspect the tests may lack proper documentation or authorization to be distributed, the statement said. 

The move comes amid shortages of home-use antigen tests as Covid-19 cases surge in Spain, spurred by the Omicron variant. To increase supply, the government has authorized six companies which make professional-use antigen tests to send them to pharmacies, for sale to the public, Spanish Health Minister Carolina Darias said Wednesday. 

The antigen tests were seized from four companies that operate in five warehouses. The police did not immediately name the companies, which face an investigation. 

Police became aware of the suspect tests on Tuesday, and moved quickly, within a day, to inspect them and make the seizures, the statement said. 

The police acted to ensure “the tests don’t give false information” to users trying to find out if they are positive for Covid-19, the national police press office for Madrid told CNN. 

Two reports released Thursday show that people who get booster doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine are well protected against severe disease and hospitalization from the Omicron variant of coronavirus, the company said.

Data from one real-life study from South Africa showed vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization from Covid-19 rose to 85% after a booster dose of the J&J vaccine, even after the Omicron variant was circulating. And data from a lab-based study in the US indicated the vaccine stimulates a strong immune response from cells known as T-cells, which protect people against severe disease even if they don’t block the virus entirely from infecting the body.

Results from both studies were released by the company in a statement but are being submitted to a pre-print server and a peer-reviewed journal, the company said.

A team at the South African Medical Research Council helped examine the results of an ongoing study of the J&J vaccine there. They looked at results from 69,000 health care workers. “When a booster shot was administered six to nine months after a primary single dose, vaccine effectiveness increased over time from 63 percent at 0-13 days, to 84 percent at 14-27 days and 85 percent at 1-2 months post-boost,” J&J said in a statement.

“Even before you factor in the increased infectiousness of Omicron, we have to remember that healthcare workers on the frontlines are at a greatly increased risk of being affected by COVID-19 in the first place,” Dr. Glenda Gray, president and CEO of the SAMRC, said in a statement. “We are therefore encouraged to see that boosting with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine regimen provides strong protection in a challenging real-world setting where there is an elevated risk of exposure – not just to COVID-19, but to the highly transmissible Omicron variant.”

Separately, Dr. Dan Barouch and colleagues at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston looked at blood taken from 65 vaccinated volunteers and tested it against the Omicron variant. They looked at both antibodies – the first line of defense against infection – and T-cells. 

Using the J&J vaccine as a booster for people who originally got two doses of Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine generated a 41-fold increase in neutralizing antibodies and a five-fold increase in the CD8 killer T cells that destroy cells infected by the virus. That stops the virus from replicating and spreading. Boosting with the Pfizer vaccine generated a 17-fold increase in neutralizing antibodies and a 1.4-fold increase in CD8 T cells four weeks later, they found.

“These data are important and these data are hopeful,” Barouch told CNN. They indicate that all Covid-19 vaccines can protect people from severe disease and death, even from the Omicron variant with all its mutations, he said.

Resident doctors in Delhi, India’s capital territory, continued to strike for a 14th consecutive day over the government’s delay in allocating hospitals to an incoming batch of doctors. 

Resident doctors, who are currently employed, have boycotted their hospital duties and held protests, the secretary of the Federation of Resident Doctors’ Association in India, Anuj Aggarwal, said.

The delay has been caused by a Supreme Court hearing on quotas for doctors with lower incomes in medical colleges, which the government says they have to wait for in order to allocate hospitals to incoming resident doctors. India’s health minister has said there is nothing they can do until the Supreme Court makes its ruling.

On Thursday, doctors gathered again outside hospitals in Delhi in a socially distanced protest, after police allegedly issued citations on Covid compliance against the group, Aggarwal told CNN. Resident doctors’ associations across the country have expressed their support for the movement.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday held another political gathering, with thousands in attendance, in Uttarakhand ahead of the state’s elections. While some were wearing masks, many were not, as seen in a live telecast of the event by the government’s press bureau.

India’s election commission said at a press conference Thursday that decisions on limiting rallies would be taken once election dates were announced.

On Thursday, 13,154 new Covid-19 cases were recorded in India, a 43% rise on the previous day, according to figures from the health ministry. While nearly a third of India’s states have issued some restrictions limiting movement, no national restrictions have been issued on large gatherings. 

Earlier, the Indian Medical Association expressed concern about the delay in allocations of resident doctors ahead of a potential third wave of Covid-19 in the country. They said in a statement on December 23 it had resulted in a “shortage of 45,000 doctors on the frontline.”

England’s National Health Service (NHS) said Thursday that it will set up new coronavirus “surge hubs” at hospitals across the country, part of its “preparations for a potential wave of Omicron admissions.”

“Temporary structures capable of housing around 100 patients will be erected in the grounds of eight hospitals across the country, with work starting as early as this week,” a statement published on NHS England’s website read.

“Given the high level of COVID-19 infections and increasing hospital admissions, the NHS is now on a war footing,” NHS England medical director Prof Stephen Powis said. The UK has previously built the “Nightingale” hospital units during earlier waves of the pandemic.

“We do not yet know exactly how many of those who catch the virus will need hospital treatment, but given the number of infections we cannot wait to find out before we act and so work is beginning from today to ensure these facilities are in place,” Powis added.

On Wednesday, the UK registered a record 183,037 new cases of Covid-19, according the government data. The latest available data also shows that on Monday, there were 1,751 new hospital admissions in England, representing a 65% increase over the course of one week. 1,061 new admissions were recorded on December 20.

The statement also read that “NHS staff have been working over Christmas on the plans to create 4,000 ‘super surge’ beds across the health service.”

According to figures published by NHS England, there were 10,462 beds occupied by Covid patients in England on Wednesday, a number rising over 10,000 for the first time since March 2021. Deaths and hospitalizations have been usually slower to show up in the Covid data, often following rising infections after a few weeks.

Police in southern China paraded four suspects through the streets for allegedly smuggling people across sealed borders in breach of pandemic control measures — a controversial act of public shaming that triggered backlash on Chinese social media.

On Tuesday, four people wearing hazmat suits, face masks and goggles were paraded in Jingxi city, Guangxi province — each carrying placards showing their names and photos on their chest and back, according to videos shared on social media and republished by state media outlets.

Each suspect was held by two officers — also wearing hazmat suits and face shields. They were surrounded by yet another circle of police, some holding machine guns and in riot gear, while a large crowd looked on.

The four people were suspected of helping others to illegally cross China’s borders, which have been largely sealed during the pandemic as part of the country’s “zero-Covid policy,” according to the state-run Guangxi Daily,

The punishment was aimed at deterring border-related crimes and encouraging public compliance with epidemic prevention and control measures, the Guangxi Daily said.

On Tuesday, authorities in Jingxi formally arrested two suspects accused of transporting two Vietnamese immigrants into China in October. One of the immigrants tested positive for coronavirus, causing schools to shut, nearly 50,000 residents to undergo home isolation and more than 10,000 tests to be conducted, according to a report on the Jingxi government website. It is unclear if the two suspects were among the four people paraded on Tuesday.

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Two of the world’s biggest chipmakers are warning that Covid-19 outbreaks and stringent lockdowns in a major Chinese industrial hub are hampering their operations.

Samsung and Micron said this week that they’ve had to adjust operations in the northwestern city of Xi’an, which is experiencing one of China’s worst community outbreaks of the coronavirus pandemic. Authorities have responded by enacting sweeping measures with an intensity and on a scale rarely seen since Wuhan, the pandemic’s original epicenter.

Any slowdown in output from the city risks worsening the global chip shortage, an ongoing crisis that has limited the supply of everything from iPhones to new cars.

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