Long Island COVID deaths, hospitalizations down compared to previous winters, data shows

While deaths and hospitalizations due to COVID-19 have increased in recent weeks, the winter pandemic surges seen in January 2021 and 2022 have not emerged.

Hospitalizations and deaths this year are a fraction of what they were at similar times the previous two Januarys, according to state and federal data. On Long Island, 45 people died the week ending Wednesday, compared to 173 who died in early January 2021 and 176 in 2022, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health experts are cautiously optimistic that number will not dramatically increase in the coming weeks as the full impact of the virus transmitted during holiday gatherings and travel becomes more evident.

“I think we have seen a much more limited surge of COVID cases than was predicted, which is a good thing,” said Andrew Pekosz, professor and vice chair of the department of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, in an email. “We need another week or so to see the full effects of Christmas/New Year holiday travel on case numbers but up until now, it’s looking like a much more modest winter surge than was predicted.”

Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology at Northwell Health, said he's "optimistic" that "we're not going to see a huge wave."

There were 912 COVID-19 hospitalizations on Long Island on Jan. 3 — the highest numbers seen since February 2022, according to state Department of Health data. On Wednesday, that number had dipped to 734 hospitalizations.

A year ago on Jan. 11, when the omicron variant took hold, there were 2,254 people hospitalized on Long Island. On Jan. 11, 2021, there were over 1,600 people hospitalized for COVID-19.

COVID-19 deaths on Long Island followed a similar pattern. The 45 people who died in Nassau and Suffolk for the week ending Jan. 11 is compared to 176 who died in the week of Jan. 12, 2022, and 173 who died in the week of Jan. 13, 2021. 

These figures follow a pattern seen nationally as well. While hospitalizations and deaths to COVID-19 have increased across the United States, they are still much lower than the last two pandemic winters.

While hospitalizations and deaths are down compared to previous winters, tracking the number of COVID-19 infections across the state and the nation has become more complicated as people more frequently use home tests. While tests taken at doctor’s offices, hospitals and urgent care centers are reported, results from home test are not.

According to the CDC, the weekly number of COVID-19 cases across the country has exceeded 400,000 since the start of December — but the actual number is likely much higher. 

One major factor driving cases in New York is the recent dominance of the highly contagious XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant, according to experts. It currently accounts for more than half of the new cases in the state.

SARS CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continues to mutate since it was discovered over three years ago. The omicron variant sparked a wave of infections and hospitalizations when it emerged in late 2021. The vaccine, created to battle the original form of the virus, appeared to be less effective in preventing transmission and illness.

But while XBB.1.5 and other recent subvariants spread faster, experts say they do not appear to cause a more severe form of COVID-19.

Farber, the Northwell epidemiologist, said there are multiple reasons why there has not been a large winter surge so far this year.

"The strain is just not that virulent … it's just not nearly as virulent as the original strains," he said. "And there's so much baseline immunity now in our population between multiple vaccines and multiple infections and reinfections, that it appears that this is probably the way it's going to be for the foreseeable future."

One year ago, he said, there wasn't widespread immunity across the population.

"It's omicron that gave the population this widespread immunity," he said.

Farber also pointed out that, for the most part, hospitalizations are limited to those who are elderly immunosuppressed or have a lot of comorbidities.

Dr. Susan Donelan, medical director of Healthcare Epidemiology at Stony Brook Medicine, pointed out that during prior years, people were masking, social distancing, working from home and taking other precautions. That prevented many of them from becoming infected on an ongoing basis.

However, people relaxed those restrictions during the winter holidays.

"A surge of exposures in a relatively short time frame created a bulge of illness, with a percentage of those dying from the infection," she wrote in an email.

Now precautions such as masking have largely been dropped as children returned to school and employees to the workplace.

"Without those mitigations in place, we have seen a very steady stream of infections over months, rather than the burst of unfettered exposures that we had seen during the winter holidays of the past couple of years," Donelan said.

Despite fewer hospitalizations and deaths compared to prior years, health officials have noted that COVID is still a serious disease, particularly for those over 65 years of age and the medically vulnerable. Experts remained concerned with the lack of interest in the updated COVID-19 vaccine booster, which first became available in September. The so-called bivalent booster is designed to help protect against the original strain and omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2.

CDC data shows just 15% of eligible people 5 years of age and older have received the shot. Among the more medically vulnerable population of people over the age of 65, just 38% have received the booster.

Meanwhile, the majority of New Yorkers currently hospitalized with COVID-19 are in that age group, according to state data.

Donelan said the booster is important to help reduce variant transmission, even if it doesn’t prevent everyone from testing positive for COVID-19.

"The people that I see that are being hospitalized in general are people who have not been fully vaccinated,” she said.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, recently pointed to the results of a study in Israel that showed people over the age of 65 who had the bivalent booster and got COVID-19 had dramatically lower hospitalization and mortality rates when compared with vaccinated people who did not get the booster.

Earlier, he took to Twitter to encourage people to get boosted.

“Vaccines keep hospitals from becoming dysfunctional during a surge,” Jha tweeted.