you talked about it, chuck, it s a lagging indicator and it s often several weeks after the fact when transmission occurs. we have seen a turndown in the number of people being tested and access to testing, and more and more people testing and no results, and i don t have a lot of faith in the numbers coming out right now, the number of cases. we are seeing it in a number of countries around the world. i am with you, i think all the washington, d.c. positives is because there s a cultural of testing in the federal government we don t have any other places. the waste water, is that a more reliable metric since we don t have a testing system that is accurate? well, it is surely one method. i look at it like a triangular forest fire with three towers in
seeing a rise in cases. we re expecting that surge. which means you usually have that lagging indicator of hospitalizations increasing. however, for childhood hospitalizations, they re increasing at double the rate, double the pace of what you re seeing in the adult population. and that s the concern you have, because the spread is at a rate that s uncontrollable at this point. we just heard from city leaders, they explained the positivity rate here in chicago is 16%. last week it was 8%. the week before, it was 4%. that s leading the mayor of chicago to really raise some alarm bells. listen to how she put it. we don t have that sound, i m so sorry, shaq. heidi, i want to get that same question to you about schools. schools in dc have just announce you have to test to get back into school. people are having a hard time getting a test. what are you seeing? katy, what we re seeing is the same approach with a lot of
departments where the case numbers come through, from the healthcare facilities to the state public health departments and on to the national level, right now are literally overrun. they relogged by many weeks. i say the numbers are surely important in the sense that, yes, we have a lot of cases, but we don t really have an understanding of how many. what is going to be important to follow is how many people are hospitalized, and how many are on oxygen. that s going to be a lagging indicator, it will be a week or more behind what is happening. that s going to be the reliable number that the media and everyone else should focus on. hospitalizations on oxygen. that s very helpful. look, we discussed and keep reiterating, if you re not vaccinated, get vaccinated, get your kids vaccinated, get boosted. that should be the new baseline. but one of the things that we have seen since delta is the breakthrough cases. some people treating them perhaps kind of casually. but behind all that is t
reported. i ve talked to health departments in the last several days where they are weeks behind in reporting cases. a daily case count means low. what we need to focus on and what we re getting on in terms of seriousness, how many people are hospitalized, particularly are requirements for oxygen. that s going to be a lagging indicator, meaning seven to ten days offset from the cases themselves. it s going to be the best measure we have. right now, that s what people like myself are tracking is what s happening with hospitalizations, and as you see, we ve now got over 100,000 hospitalizations here in the country. it s rising rapidly. that says this is a really important issue, and that while there may be many many more omicron cases of which many are mild, the sheer number of cases means even if a smaller percentage are severely ill, they re still going to be potentially more of them than we saw with delta, and that surely will challenge our health care systems. let me ask you about
yesterday 2,500 people in this country died of covid-19, hospitalizations spiking in some places. i know it is different by region. we have to stipulate again most of the people who die from this right now are unvaccinated. so from your view where are we in this pandemic? look, parts of the country are rapidly improving. other parts of the country probably are reaching their epidemic peak when you look at the mountain states, parts of the southwest, deaths are unfortunately a lagging indicator. deaths will continue to go up as infections go down. when you look at the mid atlantic, florida, places with the infection early they re clearly coming down. we could see in the united states a longer tail. that s what we saw in south africa and what we re seeing in the uk right now and other european nations where the declines aren t as sharp as the rises in terms of new infections. this ba.2 variant that was set up in the piece appears to be more contagious than the strain