COVID-19 hospitalizations rise in Maryland, as CDC sees ‘very high’ levels of activity

The readily availability home tests could be masking the actual number of COVID-19 cases in the state, health officials say. Photo by Bryan P. Sears.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about half of the United States, including Maryland, have “very high” amounts of COVID-19 virus identified in wastewater collections, signals to health officials that viral activity is rising in the community.

The report comes as the latest data from the Maryland Department of Health shows that hospitalizations for COVID-19 have been rising steadily since May, when the number stood at 38. As of Monday, at least 245 people were in hospitals in the state for COVID-19, the data showed. Since early August there have been an average of more than 200 people hospitalized with COVID each day.

Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich called the county’s recent rise in hospitalizations “bad news.”

“As of yesterday, there are 48 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Montgomery County…. Numbers have been steadily climbing over the past several weeks,” Elrich said.

“I, please, urge everyone to think about the elderly and people who are most immunocompromised. They face the most danger of getting gravely ill,” he said.

The Maryland Department of Health data also showed a rise in reported COVID-19 cases, from an average of 111 a day in June to 237 in July and, by August, an average of nearly 398 cases of COVID-19 identified per day in the state.

Maryland COVID-19 data

Maryland Matters has been tracking COVID-19 cases, deaths, hospitalizations and demographic information since the start of the pandemic. You can check out all the data here.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a  senior scholar with Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that despite the rising hospitalizations and cases, the health care systems and people have more tools at their disposal to help fight off severe disease than they did in the past.

“If you have tools like antivirals … immunity from prior infection, immunity from vaccination, which might not prevent you from getting infected, but what it will do is prevent you from getting, in general, severe disease, hospitalization and death,” Adalja said.

He said COVID-19 is now an “endemic respiratory virus.” When a virus “settles into endemicity, where, yes, it can cause severe disease and hospitalization and deaths for high-risk individuals, but it really loses the ability to do it at such a scale that a hospital goes into crisis,” he said.

“COVID-19 is always going to be with us. It’s not something that can be eradicated or eliminated,” Adalja said. “It is an endemic respiratory virus.”

But even as daily cases have increased this summer, they are nowhere near the number of daily COVID-19 cases from 2022, when new cases in Maryland regularly reached 2,000 per day. The worst spike was on Dec. 28, 2021, when 17,252 cases were reported in Maryland.

But in 2024, Adalja says that daily cases are no longer an optimal measure of the severity of COVID-19 in the state.

“If you go back to the early days of 2020, that summer, increases in cases translated in increases in hospitalizations and deaths. And what has been increasingly happening is that because of the immunity of the populations, because of the tools of science,” he said, “we’ve kind of seen a decoupling of cases from hospitalizations.”

Deaths as a result of COVID are not rising as high as in previous years, though people are still dying from the virus. According to the recent update, 26 people in Maryland have died so far in August due to COVID-19, with 11 of those deaths in the past week.

Jennifer Schneider, the disease prevention and management director for the Anne Arundel County Health Department, says that despite the rising hospital cases, COVID-19 is becoming more “normalized” in day-to-day life.

“COVID is here, COVID is going to stay. But we’re at a point now where it is very, very similar to the flu … and the prevention recommendations are very similar as well to all respiratory illness,” Schneider said.

“We’re no longer in a pandemic. We’re no longer seeing the increase in hospitalization, increase in death that we were seeing at the beginning of the pandemic,” she said. “So we’re trying to move to the same messaging as our flu messaging.”

She stressed that, like the flu, COVID-19 can more severely impact elderly individuals and those who are immunocompromised. She urges everyone to keep up regular hygiene practices such as washing hands, sneezing into their elbow, getting an updated vaccine when it becomes available in the fall and avoiding others when sick.

Meanwhile, thousands of county officials, lobbyists, activists and others will be gathering in Ocean City this week for the annual Maryland Association of Counties summer conference.

Adalja said that anyone going to a large event “has to assume that there is going to be an enhanced risk of you getting exposed or infected with other peoples viruses.”

“When humans gather, the viruses that they carry are also gathering. Large events have often provided a forum for viral exchange,” he said. “With respect to COVID-19, I think it all depends on each person’s risk calculation – how much are they trying to avoid COVID.

“If you are at a large gathering and have any high-risk conditions, I would make sure that you think about … using a mask. Think about doing activities outdoors, if you can,” Adalja said. “But know if you’re going to enter, if you’re going to engage in a large gathering like that , you’re assuming a risk and you can’t make that risk zero.”