Thread by @kylamb8

If a variant were milder, you should see the rate of hospitalizations decrease significantly from cases and also ICU should start to drop compared to total hospitalizations.

In Florida, tell me what you see when I put these two things together...

(1/2)

You might also see a simultaneous drop in length of stay if a variant is milder. That is to say with more incidental hospitalizations and less disease prevalence, you would see shorter hospital stays.

Here is a 28-day rolling average for LOS in Florida. See the same drop?

2/2

Data:

Cases from CDC U.S. Cases and Deaths time series

Hospital data from HHS daily reported patient impact and hospital capacity by state.

Length of Stays is estimated/imputed from sum of patient days over 28 days, divided by census at the start + new hospital admissions.

Dec. 30 update:

7d rate of ICU has fallen again significantly today from 16.8% to 15.9%. Until a week ago, this had never been below 20% in Florida.

LOS has also fallen on 28d running average from 4.06 to 3.95. Never had been below 5 until just 2 weeks ago.

New hospital admissions on a 7d average is down to 1.7% of cases in the last 7 days.

In August, it was running 9-10% of cases.

Last December on this date, it was running 9%.

Here is the significance of this if these numbers continue:

Before, in FL for every 1,000 cases, there would be ~70-100 hospital admissions, with 17-30 ending up in ICU.

At these current rates, 17-20 are going to the hospital with 2-3 ending up in ICU so far.