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Doctors in hospitals across the country are taking note: This Covid wave looks different than the last.

Once again, healthcare workers are exhausted and contracting the virus themselves, as they are faced with the highly contagious Omicron variety. And the number of patients entering hospitals with the variant is staggering, filling much-needed beds, delaying non-emergency procedures, and increasing the risk of vulnerable, uninfected patients contracting the virus.

But in Omicron hotspots from New York to Florida and Texas, a smaller proportion of these patients landed in intensive care units or needed mechanical ventilation, doctors said. And a lot of it — roughly 50 to 65 percent of admissions at some New York hospitals – go to the hospital for other ailments and then test positive for the virus.

Emergency medicine physician of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital, Dr. “We are seeing an increase in the number of hospitalizations,” Rahul Sharma said. However, the severity of the disease appears to be different from previous waves,” he said. “We don’t send that many patients to the ICU, we don’t intubate that many patients, and in fact, most of our patients who come to the emergency room and test positive are discharged.”

While it’s still early for definitive predictions, the shift in hospital patterns is in line with emerging data suggesting that Omicron may be a variant with milder effects than what came before. infect the lungs, where it can cause serious illness. However, compared to earlier variants, a lower rate of serious cases also occurs, due to the fact that Omicron is transmitted to more people who have previously been immune through infection or vaccination. Doctors said the vast majority of Omicron patients in intensive care units were unvaccinated or had severely compromised their immune systems.

With staff shortages, hospitals are under tremendous pressure. hospitalized in New York over the top fluctuation of last winter. And Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency On Tuesday, he noted that the state had more Covid-19 patients hospitalized at that time than at any previous point during the pandemic.

Director of emergency services at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dr. “We are really crushed,” said Gabe Kelen.

Experts said the number of intensive care patients is a lagging indicator and is likely to increase in the coming weeks. What’s more, some states are still struggling under the pressure of hospitalizations caused by Delta, an earlier version of the virus that can be more lethal. (Hospitals are often in the dark about which variant newly admitted patients are infected with.)

Still, several reports suggest that Omicron is a different foe than the variants that came before it. Doctors said the challenges hospitals face – at least so far – have more to do with staffing and contamination than stocking equipment.

“Early in the pandemic, we were worried about extinction. thingsD., MD, an infectious disease and critical care physician at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC. Ryan Maves said, “Now, the real limitations are obviously physical bed space, but even more so is staffing.”

When reports emerged in early December that hospitals in South Africa were being treated relatively few serious cases of Omicron, experts stressed that the findings should be interpreted with caution. South Africa has a relatively young population, with a large proportion of them infected from previous waves, leaving the affected people with a pre-existing immunity.

But now that the virus has spread around the world and the United States, there is more evidence that many people infected with Omicron in recent weeks are better off than those infected with other variants or during previous surges.

In Britain, people with Omicron are about Half the probability of requiring hospital care and one-third more likely to be admitted to emergency rooms than those infected with Delta a government report published last week. Early reports from Canada suggest a similar pattern.

and one new report coming The Houston Methodist healthcare system, which has listed the vast majority of viral samples from its patients since February 2020, found the same thing overall.

As of December 20, the new variant was causing more than 90 percent of new Covid cases at Houston Methodist. In the new analysis, researchers compared 1,313 symptomatic patients infected with Omicron to that date with Houston Methodist patients infected with Delta or Alpha variants earlier in the pandemic.

The number of Omicron cases studied in Houston is small, and the worst results take time to appear. But the study found that less than 15 percent of these early Omicron patients were hospitalized, compared to 43 percent of Delta patients and 55 percent of Alpha patients.

Among those admitted, Omicron patients had a shorter need for mechanical ventilation and a shorter hospital stay than those infected with other variants.

D., head of pathology and genomics medicine at Houston Methodist, who led the research. “On average – and I emphasize on average – cases of Omicron are less severe,” said James Musser. “And that’s obviously good news for our patients,” he added.

Omicron patients were also younger and more likely to be vaccinated than those with previous variants, which may partly explain the milder illness.

While the reports are encouraging, it’s still too early and there isn’t enough detailed data yet to draw firm conclusions about Omicron’s inherent seriousness, said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University in Atlanta.

Dr. “There really hasn’t been enough time,” Dean said. It took months for multiple large studies of Delta’s hospitalization risks to emerge.

Cases have been rising steadily in New York since December and are currently overwhelmingly explained by Omicron. Covid hospitalizations have also increased sharply and admissions to the ICU rising more slowly.

At New York University Langone Health, for example, about 65 percent of patients admitted with Covid were found to have the virus “by accident,” and their hospitalization was not primarily due to illness. At NewYork-Presbyterian, just under half of Covid referrals were accidental.

Hospitals in other cities also report higher rates of incidental infections. Opposite the Jackson Health System hospitals in Florida, 53 percent It was announced that 471 Covid patients first applied to the hospital for other reasons. Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Kelen said that 20 percent of patients seeking treatment for their non-Covid complaints at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Maryland have tested positive for the infection.

Incidental infections can still occur significant risks for people hospitalized for other health problems. The large number of hospitalized patients with asymptomatic Covid poses an additional challenge to infection control.

An infectious disease specialist at Emory University School of Medicine, Dr. “You still have to isolate them,” Carlos del Rio said. “You still need to treat them as patients in the hospital who could potentially transmit Covid. And when you have less staff, then you really have a problem.”

A spokesperson, Lisa Greiner, said that intensive care admissions among people hospitalized for Covid at NYU Langone were 58 percent lower than in January 2021. At Mount Sinai South Nassau, doctors are also seeing fewer critically-care patients compared to previous peaks, but the sheer number of cases means many more people are very sick than in recent months.

Chief of infectious diseases and epidemiologist at the hospital, Dr. “Overall I would say the disease is less severe,” said Aaron Glatt. However, “We have had deaths from Covid that we have not seen for a long time. And we see patients in the intensive care unit and ventilator, which we have not seen for a long time.”

Experts said that the majority of those entering intensive care units are unvaccinated or vaccinated people who are in higher risk groups. And among people entering the intensive care unit, cases can be as severe as in previous variants.

The increase in hospitalizations has put more stress on overburdened hospitals.

Before Omicron came along, many hospitals were already short of staff. Even when hospital beds were available, the migration of health workers during the pandemic has made it more difficult to provide care.

Emergency medicine physician and academic dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, Dr. “There’s just no capacity,” said Megan Ranney. “Not enough staff for available beds.”

NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell’s Dr. Sharma said the increase in hospitalized Covid cases was accompanied by an increase in hospitalizations for other conditions., makes it harder for hospitals. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, these admissions fell as people without Covid avoided hospitals.

Dr. “People aren’t afraid to come to hospitals like they were in 2020. Our volumes in our emergency departments are almost back, if not above pre-pandemic numbers,” Sharma said. “This means we’re busy – capacity is becoming an increasing challenge.”

Staff shortages are causing many hospitals to consider reducing elective surgeries.

“We will never prevent strokes and we will never prevent heart attacks,” said Ed Jimenez, executive director of the University of Florida Health Shands hospital system. “But if this continues like this, we will have hospitals that need to start thinking about slowing down their planned admissions.”

Dr. “We hope not to cancel elective surgeries, but we thought about it,” del Rio said at Grady Hospital in Atlanta. “The reality is that we’re seeing some of these elective surgeries cancel themselves out because people come in and test positive for Covid.”

It’s been nearly six weeks since the world first learned about Omicron, and hospital staff are still nervously waiting to see how the coming weeks unfold.

Dr. As of Tuesday morning, Houston Methodist had 630 inpatients with the virus at its eight hospitals, the vast majority of which were likely Omicron, Musser said. That figure remains below the system’s Delta peak, where between 850 and 900 concurrent inpatients are infected, but the number of new cases is still rising, he said.

“How high will it go?” said. “I can’t tell you. I don’t know. We’re all watching, frankly, very, very closely.”

Gina Kolata contributing reporting.