The Allegheny County Health Department reported Thursday that there were 1,219 new COVID-19 infections, 183 hospitalizations and 15 deaths reported for the week ending Wednesday.
Due to a reporting issue last week, this week’s hospitalization data includes two weeks of information. Last week, the report showed 880 cases, 6 hospitalizations and 12 deaths.
At the same time, the county has been experiencing a large number of flu cases, with 11,395 cumulative cases recorded for the season as of Dec. 17, compared with 1,016 at this point last year. But the number of new weekly cases has gone down from a peak two weeks ago, Health Department data shows.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the COVID-19 community level in Allegheny County was “low” as of Thursday afternoon. The only county in Pennsylvania listed as “high” at that time was Mercer County.
But nationally, the numbers of COVID cases and hospitalizations have been trending upward.
And government data released Thursday showed that life expectancy in the United States fell in 2021, in part because of COVID-19. Life expectancy in the U.S. dropped to 76.4 years, down from 77 in 2020, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
The report showed that 3.46 million people died in the United States in 2021, 80,502 more than in 2020. COVID-19 was responsible for 416,893 deaths, and 106,699 were from drug overdoses.
First Published: December 22, 2022, 9:16 p.m.
Updated: December 23, 2022, 12:05 p.m.
