Even a stopped clock...

 ... is right twice a day. And today that stopped clock is the odious Florida Governor DeSantis, who has been saying that the hospitals need to start distinguishing between those hospitalized with COVID and those who "just happen to have it."  He is right. COVID hospitalization numbers have been contaminated by this problem since the start of the pandemic. Which might be okay if the percentage of incidental COVID infections among hospitalized patients had been staying steady. The number might be inaccurate but it should remain a good basis of comparison between one wave and the next.

But that is not what is happening. With the Omicron wave there are now so many people with asymptomatic or trivial COVID infections that in hot spots like New York City most of the COVID hospitalizations were not actually hospitalized for COVID. That makes the "number of COVID hospitalizations" a pretty meaningless number. Although it might provide some insight into what percent of the population is already infected with Omicron.

Dr. Fritz François, chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Health in New York City, said about 65% of patients admitted to that system with COVID-19 recently were primarily hospitalized for something else and were incidentally found to have the virus.

...

At two large Seattle hospitals over the past two weeks, three-quarters of the 64 patients testing positive for the coronavirus were admitted with a primary diagnosis other than COVID-19.

This is actually good news, in a way. It means that Omicron hospitalizations are even lower than the already much diminished numbers being reported.