Omicron and Hospital Overcrowding Make For a Deadly Combination

The crowding wrought by omicron has made going to the hospital more dangerous and likely to be more deadly.

The variant is so contagious that it is deluging hospitals with patients at a moment of severe staff shortages. That combination risks eroding the advantages of omicron’s oft-touted milder symptoms compared to previous versions of Covid.

“Overcrowding kills,” said Sameer Kadri, an intensive-care physician at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.

Kadri was the lead researcher on a landmark study that found early in the pandemic that Covid patients’ risk of dying rose where hospital staff was strained by ...