With Omicron now the dominant COVID-19 variant in Maryland, the state this week continued to experience a surge of confirmed coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
The number of Marylanders hospitalized due to coronavirus reached 3,208 on Friday, setting yet another record for the state.
Before last week, the highest number of coronavirus-related hospitalizations Maryland had reported during the pandemic was 1,952 on Jan. 11, 2021.
But hospitalizations shot up in the weeks after Thanksgiving 2021 and Maryland set a new record of 2,046 COVID-19 hospitalized patients on Dec. 28.
The number of Marylanders hospitalized with COVID-19 has continued to rise, surpassing 3,000 on Monday.
Maryland has now surpassed 800,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 during the pandemic. The state has confirmed a total of 800,743 cases to date, including 11,778 cases newly reported Friday.
The average positivity rate for the past seven days was just under 30% – 29.98% – on Thursday. It dipped slightly to 28.3% on Friday but remains higher than the state has seen for most of the pandemic.
Before the surge over the past few weeks, the previous record high positivity average was 26.88% on April 17, 2020.
A total of 11,868 Marylanders are confirmed to have died from COVID-19, including 59 residents whose deaths were newly reported on Friday. There are also 239 Marylanders whose deaths are suspected to be linked to COVID-19.
As of Thursday morning, 3,950,438 Marylanders (65.343%) had received their second dose of a two-dose vaccine and 328,280 (5.43%) had received a single-dose vaccine.
Of those individuals, 1,670,441 residents received a booster dose.
