The state added 11,651 cases of COVID-19 over the past week, with 156 deaths, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday.
Michigan reported an average of about 1,664cases per day over the last seven days,a 4% decrease from a daily average of 1,738 cases a week prior. On Oct. 25, the state said it had added 12,167 cases and 158 deaths from the virus in the previous week. The state tally does not include those who test positive with an at-home test.
On Monday, the state reported that 1,111 adults and 26 pediatric patients were hospitalized with confirmed infections, an increase from last week’s 986 adults and 23 children.Inpatient records were set on Jan. 10, when 4,580 adults were hospitalized with COVID-19.
On Monday in Michigan, about 6% of the state’s hospital beds were filled with COVID-19 patients, and there was an average of 1,391 emergency room visits related to COVID-19 per day in the state.That compares with 24% of hospital beds being full and 2,889 daily emergency room visits due to the virus in the first week of January.
All Metro Detroit health departments are following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that recommend indoor masking for public settings and K-12 schools as the rate of infection has grown from “medium” to “high.”
Tuesday’s additions bring the state’s overall totals to 2,897,827 cases and 39,406 deaths since the virus was first detected here in March 2020.
The federal Food and Drug Administration in September, signed off on updated versions of the mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) gave its approval, as did CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and is now available in Michigan.
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As of last Monday, no counties in Michigan are considered at a “high level” for the increased burden on health care or severe disease. Thirty-two Michigan counties have a “medium” transmission level, according to the state health department.
Case counts are well below early January, when the state set a new high mark with more than 20,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 per day.
In Michigan, variants of the virus have moved at a high rate, proving more contagious than past variants and infecting unvaccinated and vaccinated residents.
A new iteration of the omicron variant, BA.5, now is the dominant strain across the country, thanks to its elusiveness when encountering the human immune system. The size of that wave is unclear because most people are testing at home or not testing at all.
Antibodies from vaccines and previous COVID-19 infections offer limited protection against BA.5, leading experts to call it “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”
In Michigan, 317 cases of a rare inflammatory condition in children linked with the coronavirus have been reported to the CDC. About 63% of kids with the syndrome are admitted to intensive care units, and there have been five deaths.
As of Monday, 41 outbreaks were reported over the prior week, 31 of which were reported in long-term care facilities and four outbreaks in K-12 schools. The state is tracking 449 ongoing outbreak cases.
About 68.5% of state residents, or 6.8 million, have received their first doses of a vaccine, and more than 60% are fully vaccinated. More than 252,000 children ages 5-11 in Michigan, or 31%, have received their first dose of the vaccine.
More than 3.5 million individuals, or 37% of the eligible population, have received a vaccine booster.
