Low patient bed capacity led New York state to order 40 of its hospitals to suspend nonessential elective surgeries for at least two weeks, reported CNN. The University of Kansas Health System, meanwhile, is considering activating its crisis standards of care. "At that point we have to turn on a switch that says we got to triage the people we can help the most," he said, "and that means we've have to let some people die who we might have been able to help, but we weren't sure about — they were too far gone or had too much of an injury, or maybe we can't get to that trauma that just came in,” said chief medical officer Dr. Steven Stites. The vast majority of patients hospitalized were unvaccinated, he said.

Los Angeles County, meanwhile, reported 45,076 new cases Thursday and more than 4,000 hospitalizations, according to ABC7 News. Just days before, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported that the county had accumulated more cases in one week than it ever had before, with hospitalizations doubling to 3,200 in just one week. It also has the most confirmed cases by county in the nation at over 2 million, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center COVID-19 map.


"The entire country is now experiencing high levels of community transmission,” said the CDC earlier this month. It added that Omicron may now account for approximately 95 percent of Covid cases in the U.S. “Hospitalizations are also on the rise. While early data suggest omicron infections might be less severe than those of other variants, the increases in cases and hospitalizations is expected to stress the healthcare system in the coming weeks.”

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