COVID community levels and COVID hospital usage

The Quarantine Zone
1

Last week the CDC introduced “community levels” as a new metric for understanding the intensity of the pandemic:

In contrast to the earlier “community transmission levels” metric, the new system only has three distinct levels: high, medium, and low. To determine community level, the new metric considers:

  • new cases per 100K people per seven days
  • new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100K people per seven days
  • percent of staffed inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 patients (7-day average)

For the purposes of that last bullet point, who gets counted as a “COVID-19 patient?” Does this only include patients who are being actively treated for COVID symptoms, or does it also include patients who were admitted for other reasons but happened to also test positive for the virus?

2

It also includes patients admitted for other reasons. From this link about how the new measure is calculated:

Get in a car accident while asymptomatic, and test positive on admittance, and it still counts for the metric being used.

3

Which makes sense - because of the difference in protocols to prevent the spread.

4

Yep, that’s what happened to my uncle. He went in for a swollen leg. He tested positive but never became symptomatic. But he had to be isolated differently. And dad, who drove him, had to isolate and get tested 5 days later. Fortunately, dad had insisted on masks, and we’d convinced Uncle to get vaccinated, so dad tested negative.