The wildly contagious omicron variant has already hit New York and Washington, D.C., hard but now declining infections and hospitalizations suggest this wave might be subsiding.
"We're really on that downturn," Terry Fairbanks, chief quality and safety officer at Washington's MedStar Health, told The Wall Street Journal. "We waited a few days before we got hopeful about it, but I think we are calling it a trend now."
The D.C.-area hospital system had about 700 COVID patients Wednesday, which was down from the omicron peak of Jan. 10, according to the Journal.
New York's largest healthcare provider Northwell Health recently reported 1,555 patients, which is down from 1,700 two weeks ago, according to physician-in-chief David Battinelli.
"It's just starting to fall off now," Battinelli told the Journal.
The staffers are also reporting less infections and hospitals are less strained on available resources, according to the report.
"It is dramatically easier this week," New York's Mount Sinai Hospital COO David Reich told the Journal.
New York State Health Commissioner Mary Bassett told the paper the "numbers are still far too high," but "there's absolute reason for optimism and that we're beginning to see a scale-down."
Yale New Haven Health System is also coming off an omicron peak, chief clinical officer Dr. Tom Balcezak told the Journal.
The stays during omicron are general shorter than before, hospital officials suggested in general, according to the report.