PHILADELPHIA — By the fall of 2020, the pandemic’s first year, doctors treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients said they were starting to get the regimen down to a science. They learned when to put patients on ventilators, administer steroids, and deploy an expanding array of newer drugs.
Yet the latest data from Pennsylvania and the U.S. show that as late as December 2021, one in seven people in the hospital with COVID were still dying — a rate not much better than at the start.
Experts say that comparing in-hospital death rates from then and now is not necessarily appropriate, in part because the data do not indicate the patients’ other health conditions, or whether, once the vaccines were available, they had gotten the shots. But the numbers are nevertheless a reminder that even now, a steady stream of people are going to the hospital with COVID, and plenty are so sick that they won’t survive.
