Thursday’s daily update from the national infectious disease agency State Serum Institute (SSI) show that 1,354 people currently admitted to hospitals in Denmark have a positive Covid-19 test. That is 17 more than on Wednesday.

The number has increased every day since January 30th with one exception, on February 5th. It stood at 948 on the penultimate day of last month.

However, a considerable proportion of those patients are not admitted because of Covid-19. They are receiving treatment for other reasons but have also returned a positive Covid-19 test. The figure of 1,354 includes 329 patients at psychiatric departments.

33 Covid-19 patients are currently admitted to intensive care units, with 12 of them receiving ventilator treatment. Those numbers are five and four fewer than on Wednesday, respectively, and are roughly on par with the number of ICU and ventilator patients seen throughout recent weeks.

They are also lower than at the beginning of 2022, when around 80 Covid-19 patients were in ICU care.

An additional 53,747 new cases of Covid-19 were registered by SSI on Thursday from 172,183 PCR tests, giving a test positivity rate of 31 percent.

Testing in high numbers is less helpful than it may have been in the past given the free spread of the milder Omicron variant since national Covid restrictions were lifted, according to an expert.

“We will soon have to stop testing so many people. It does not give any information. It made sense earlier in the pandemic but the money can now be better spent,” Christian Wamberg, chief physician at the intensive care unit at Bispebjerg Hospital, told news wire Ritzau.

“We can test the people who come into hospital with symptoms and are sick. But it is otherwise silly to keep mass-testing the population,” he said.

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