12 Worst States for the New Stealth COVID-19 Surge

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The new, quiet COVID-19 surge appears to be growing, not sputtering out, and it’s possible that the stealth surge looks smaller than it is because of public health agencies’ shrinking pandemic data reporting programs.

About 2.54 of every 100,000 U.S. working-age residents went to the hospital with confirmed COVID-19 in the week ending Dec. 2. That was nowhere near the highs reported during the worst weeks of the pandemic, but it was up from a 2023 low of 0.85 for the week ending July 1, and it was up from 2.18 for the week ending Nov. 27.

At the state level, the working hospitalization rate ranged from 0, in Vermont, up to more than 5 in two states.

For a look at the states with the highest working-age hospitalization rates, see the gallery above.

For data on all 50 states and the District of Columbia, see the table below.

What it means: COVID-19 keeps going. One explanation is that many people got together for the Thanksgiving holiday without masking or following any other precautions, and another is that a relatively new JN.1 variant, an offshoot of the omicron variant, may be better at spreading than many other COVID-19 variants.

Persistently high mortality rates could make life insurance more expensive and, eventually, annuities and pension plans somewhat cheaper.

Features that provide death benefits for beneficiaries of annuity holders and survivors of pension plan participants often limit the positive impact of increased mortality on annuities and pension plans.

The data: The United States has about 172 million residents ages 25 through 59, who are in their prime working years and who are likely to own life insurance and contribute to retirement plans.

One challenge for financial professionals trying to analyze COVID-19 death and hospitalization data is that budget cuts and policy changes have eliminated many streams of national COVID-19 reports, reduced the number of hospitals sending in data and caused some states to drop out of the federal data collection programs that still exist.

Iowa, Kansas, New Hampshire and Oklahoma have stopped sending routine COVID-19 death data reports to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, and Oregon is sending the CDC only information about cases resulting in death.

The COVID-19 and influenza hospital capacity impact reports, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is getting only about one-quarter as much hospital data as it was getting in November 2011 and about 63% as much data as it was getting at the beginning of this year.

Rate calculations: Life insurers and public health agencies often express death rates, hospitalization rates and similar types of statistics in terms of “number of lives affected per 100,000 people in the group studied” to help compensate for different places’ population levels and to create numbers that are relatively easy to read.

We used 2022 Census Bureau state population data broken out by single year of age to create the figures for state-level working-age hospitalizations per 100,000 working-age residents.

Working-Age COVID-19 Hospitalizations

Credit: Vydrevic Ilya/Adobe Stock

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