The number of COVID-19 patients in the Cincinnati area's hospitals hit the highest level in a year Thursday as the positivity rate for new COVID-19 tests also hit a new record at 30.1%.
Meanwhile, Ohio has broken its daily COVID-19 hospitalization record for 10 days straight. As of Friday, there were 6,570 Ohioans with the virus being treated in Ohio hospitals.
The pressure on the Cincinnati area's 40 hospitals came at the end of a week that started with three local health systems saying Monday they were postponing or limiting some elective surgeries due to the latest COVID-19 surge. The hospitals used the same tactic in the spring of 2020 in the first wave of the pandemic to keep the health systems from crashing.
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The pandemic is forcing more hospitals across the state to limit some surgeries, Ohio health officials said at a briefing Friday morning. The hospitals that made the shift midweek included Premier Health, which operates Atrium Medical Center in Middletown, and Kettering Health System, which operates Kettering Health Hamilton.
The surge in cases is due to the more contagious omicron variant of the novel coronavirus.
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The number of new cases per 100,000 residents, as measured by a seven-day moving average, rose in northern Kentucky while holding steady in southwest Ohio.
The city of Cincinnati declared a state of emergency on Dec. 29 because of a lack of fire department staffing. Gov. Mike DeWine that same day mobilized another 1,250 members of the Ohio National Guard to help at the state's hospitals. , as the more contagious but less dangerous omicron variant of the novel coronavirus takes hold in the state.
What's happening in Cincinnati hospitals
Roughly 27% of all patients in local hospitals right now have COVID-19. Regional hospitals continue to define their strain using the terms: “critical operations.”
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As of Thursday, the last date for which data is publicly available, the Cincinnati region's 40 hospitals had the highest number of COVID-19 cases since January 2021 with 862 patients (182 in intensive care and 129 on ventilators). Of the region's 513 intensive care beds, 102% were full, according to the Health Collaborative's Situational Dashboard. That means that 10 additional beds had to be converted into ICU beds. Meanwhile; 97% of the region's roughly 2,500 medical-surgical beds were full.
What's happening with infections?
The rate at which the novel coronavirus is reproducing locally indicates there is community spread of the contagion.
The situational dashboard reports the R naught, a value that measures spread, for the region and individual areas of it for the last seven days. Thursday's reading for the region was 1.42, according to the Health Collaborative's Situational Dashboard. In Hamilton County, it was 1.4. Any reading over 1 indicates community spread of the virus.
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What's the local toll since the COVID pandemic started?
A total of 4,553 residents of the 16-county region have been reported as dying of COVID-19, an Enquirer analysis shows. A total of 39 cases of the illness have been reported, up 24,213 or 6.7% from Dec. 29. That number may not reflect the full picture because some people have had the disease more than once – and an untold number of infections aren't in the total because they were discovered by people using in-home tests and were not reported to health officials.
Titus Wu of the USA TODAY Network's Ohio Bureau contributed to this report.
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