A screenshot from Dr. Clay Dunagan's Thursday briefing
On Thursday, Dr. Clay Dunagan, BJC HealthCare’s chief clinical officer, gave an update on COVID-19 in the St. Louis region on behalf of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force. After weeks of increasing cases and hospitalizations due to the Delta variant, those appear to be plateauing. The reproduction number—the measurement that reveals transmission—is 1. When that number is less than 1, it means that cases in the community are decreasing. When it is greater than 1, it means that cases are increasing. “This tells the story that we're seeing, which is we're very much on a plateau right now,” Dunagan said.
The seven-day moving average of new COVID hospital admissions is 74, slightly lower than last week. The seven-day moving average of hospitalized COVID patients is 524. There were 503 COVID patients in the region’s hospitals this morning; 125 were in ICUs and 82 were on ventilators. The seven-day moving average for deaths was eight.
Getting a COVID-19 vaccine is still the best way to prevent severe disease. Eighty-five percent of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated. Dunagan said that of the patients who are hospitalized but fully vaccinated, most of them have underlying conditions that compromise their immune system. “We’re not seeing a lot of individuals who have relatively normal health [and] who have been vaccinated landing in the hospital,” he said.
The pediatric hospitalization data continues to sit in the double-digits. There are currently 13 patients in the 0-11 age range hospitalized. That age group cannot yet receive the vaccine. Four of those children are in ICUs. The hospital census for the 12-18 age group is 11, with one patient in the ICU.
Dunagan took a moment to address the severity of the cases in children who are hospitalized with COVID in the ICU. “The question [that] has come up a couple of times is, How severely ill are kids in ICUs? And these patients are very ill,” he said.
The task force is monitoring the Mu variant, a new variant that was first reported in South America and is classified as a variant of interest, not a variant of concern. The new variant has characteristics that make it somewhat more transmissible, Dunagan said, but it has—so far—not been able to spread widely. That is because the highly contagious Delta has remained the dominant variant.
You can watch the full briefing below:
