The number of people hospitalized in Delaware fell below 100 on June 12 and has steadily continued to fall.
“We’re not seeing the level of severe disease we saw early in the pandemic,’’ Dr. Rick Pescatore, chief physician at the state Division of Public Health, told WHYY News.
Average daily hospitalizations is just one of the three factors Gov. John Carney is monitoring to qualify for a full Phase 3 economic reopening and in-classroom K-12 learning. The other two factors — the percentage of positive tests, now at 4.2%, and number of daily cases, now at 53 — are still too high to qualify for a move from Phase 2 to Phase 3, Carney has repeatedly said.
Pescatore, who has moonlighted as an emergency room physician in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York during the pandemic, said the medical community has learned better strategies for handling COVID-19 cases without admitting patients to the hospital.
“We know better how to intervene upon it and what to expect from a clinical trajectory, but there also clearly have been fundamental changes in how we approach it, how the virus affects different populations,” Pescatore said.
Pescatore and Dr. Mike Benninghoff, who heads intensive care at ChristianaCare, the state’s largest hospital system, aren’t proclaiming victory.
With no vaccine approved yet, they warn that with the fall flu season fast approaching and a resurgence of the pandemic predicted, hospital beds and ICU units could again fill up rapidly.
If people stop practicing physical distancing and wearing masks or “aren’t using common sense,’’ Benninghoff said, “then absolutely, because of the asymptomatic carrier stage, it could spread through a whole group of people really fast.”
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