Momentary good news on the COVID front

[edschweppe]

Okay, this is good news. In a happy milestone, a Boston hospital reports zero inpatients with COVID-19:

In another promising sign of the retreat of COVID-19, Tufts Medical Center said Tuesday it had reached the point where zero inpatients are positive for the disease. The number hasn't been that low since the pandemic began ravaging the state more than three years ago.

Dr. Shira Doron, chief infection control officer for the Tufts Medicine health system, said that since the beginning of the pandemic she's gotten an e-mail with COVID-19 patient counts every morning and the numbers had been heading toward zero recently.

"Every day there has been a little part of me that says one day maybe we will see zero and I couldn't really predict when that would be," she said Tuesday. "And today was the day."

"It's really a milestone," she said. But she cautioned, "COVID is not going away. There will be peaks and valleys, rises and falls of those case numbers," and the number could rise above zero again.

The hospital said there had been three peaks of inpatients with COVID-19. The number reached 88 on April 21, 2020; 57 on Jan. 18, 2021; and 75 on Jan. 14, 2022.

I'm not super excited; looking at the state's latest raw data (8.9Mb .xlsx file), Tufts only had two COVID patients on April 25, while twenty-four other (mostly small) hospitals statewide reported zero. The problem is the places like Baystate Medical Center out in Springfield, which reported forty-one patients ...