The Hawaii Department of Health on Wednesday reported a decline in the weekly seven-day average of COVID-19 Opens in a new tab cases for the first time in more than two months, but officials say it is too soon to know whether the state has reached a plateau.
The seven-day average of daily cases was reported at 1,085, down from 1,210 reported June 1. The most recent seven-day average reflects new cases from May 28 to June 3, which includes Memorial Day weekend, when fewer people sought testing.
Additionally, the number of new infections reported over the past week, 8,033, was down from the 8,124 reported June 1. That figure of 8,033, according to DOH, reflects cases counted from a different seven-day period, from Memorial Day on May 30 to June 5.
The state’s average positivity rate, meanwhile, increased to 19.2% from 18.4% reported last week.
“The data is giving indications that we may be plateauing at this point,” said Tim Brown, an infectious disease modeler at the East-West Center in Manoa, who noted that testing was down during Memorial Day weekend. “But we need to confirm that over the next couple of weeks. Right now our positivity rate is still increasing statewide.”
Positivity rates on Hawaii island appear to be declining, he said, but whether other counties will follow remains to be seen. Even if cases are leveling off, however, they are doing so at a high level.
“The levels are going to be high for probably the next month or month-and-a-half which means it’s not time to be letting your guard down,” he said. “There’s still a lot of COVID in the community.”
People should still take extra precautions, especially around the elderly and immunocompromised, he said.
As of Wednesday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continued to rank Honolulu and Maui counties as red, high-risk communities, where wearing a well-fitted mask is recommended in public places indoors, regardless of vaccination status. Kauai and Hawaii counties are yellow, medium-risk communities, where masking is optional.
CDC bases community levels on metrics including number of hospital beds occupied, hospital admission rates per 100,000, and new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 over the past seven days.
Hospitalizations ticked up by just one over last week, with the state dashboard reporting 190 patients with COVID-19 in hospitals Wednesday, up from 189 reported the previous week. Of the 190, 12 were in intensive care and six on ventilators.
The seven-day rolling average of hospitalizations over the past week was about 186, with the highest number, 197, on Monday, including 17 in intensive care, according to the Healthcare Association of Hawaii, a nonprofit representing health care providers.
HAH said staffing shortages continue to pose the greatest challenge from this surge, with hundreds of front-line workers currently out sick with COVID-19.
Nationally, the CDC Data Trackers reports a daily average of more than 104,000 new COVID-19 cases, down from previous weeks, and an average of more than 4,000 new hospitalizations per day.
The cases in Hawaii as well as nationally are considered undercounts due to home-test results, which are not included in many official reports.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the national numbers seem to be at a plateau for the surge driven by omicron subvariant BA.2.12.1.
“We are in what appears to be a plateau — not all plateaus stay plateaus — we’ve experienced in the last couple of years times when numbers appeared to level off and then for one reason or another started to go up again,” said Inglesby during a Tuesday media briefing. “So it’s not possible to say that this surge has peaked for sure.”
Inglesby said in the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S., cases are beginning to come down, but in the South and West, cases and hospitalizations are still continuing to go up.
“So as in the past, it looks different depending on where you are in the country,” said Inglesby, “but we are definitely still in the middle of a surge.”
And there are still uncertainties about the future, he added, including possible new surges in the fall and winter.
Additionally, he said cases caused by omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 are rising, and could lead to some level of surge beyond what we see now, or slow down the return to a lower baseline of cases.
“It’s too soon to say whether that will happen but we have seen that BA.4, BA.5 have had a big impact in some other countries in the world,” he said.
Inglesby also said it is concerning that a third of the U.S. is not fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and that only a third has had a booster shot.
“We know that full vaccination and boosting reduces serious illness, hospitalization and death, and compared to many other peer countries our vaccination and booster rates do not measure up well,” he said.
The latest omicron variants, BA.2.12.1 as well as BA.4 and BA.5, believed to be more contagious than the original BA.1, have all been detected in Hawaii.
Nationally, BA.2.12.1 now makes up 62.2% of new cases in the U.S., according to the CDC, while BA.4 makes up 5.4% and BA.5 makes up 7.6%.
The Hawaii Health Department expects to have a wastewater monitoring program up in the state later this summer to help monitor COVID-19 infection levels as well as the presence of variants. Statewide wastewater monitoring data, however, is not available yet.
As of Wednesday, 77.7% of Hawaii’s population had been vaccinated with the primary series of COVID-19 vaccines, according to DOH, with 40.5% boosted and 7.4% double-boosted.
COVID-19 vaccines for keiki under 5 are on the horizon, possibly as soon as June 21, if federal regulators authorize shots for the age group, as expected.
There were also eight more coronavirus-related deaths reported Wednesday, bringing the total COVID-19 death toll to 1,465.
