August's COVID-19 Hospitalizations More Than Doubled Since Last Year

By Alyssa Wilson Published: August 26, 2021

August’s COVID-19 Hospitalizations More Than Doubled Since Last Year

FILE - In this Jan. 7, 2021, file photo, two nurses put a ventilator on a patient in a COVID-19 unit at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, Calif. U.S. hospital intensive care units in many parts of the country are straining under record numbers of COVID-19 patients. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

By: Alyssa Wilson

More than 100,000 people in the United States are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

As of Wednesday, 100,317 people were hospitalized from the virus, more than doubling the 48,851 hospitalized last August, CNN reported. The cases across the country continue to rise as the Delta variant causes breakthrough infections among people who are vaccinated and wreaks havoc on the unvaccinated.

With only 51.7% of the U.S. population fully vaccinated, health care professionals are becoming overwhelmed as intensive care units in hospitals fill up quickly. The Delta variant has hit Southern states, including Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana, especially hard.

“I had to turn away a cancer patient that needed an emergency treatment,” Dr. Nitesh Paryani, a Florida oncologist, told CNN. “For the first time in sixty years of my family’s history of treating cancer, we had to turn someone away…We just didn’t have a bed. There was simply no room in the hospital to treat the patient.”

Nurse Alice Benjamin joined BNC host Sharon Reed on Start Your Day to discuss what health care professionals on the front lines are experiencing. As nurses make up most of the healthcare workforce, she said they are experiencing compassion fatigue.

“Nurses, we have a lot of compassion, we’ll take care of you [and] we’ll do anything to keep you alive,” Benjamin said. “Eighteen months in, when we know there are interventions and things that you can do but are deciding not to, it’s starting to wear us down, because it didn’t have to be this way.”