What analyzing thousands of doctor visits tells us about the Delta variant

We hoped we were done with COVID. Sadly, the data shows we are not. At Sesame — where we connect thousands of patients with doctors and specialists every week — our visit volume, chief complaints, and booking data tell the story: we aren’t done with COVID-19. Not yet, anyway.

Earlier this year, we noticed a sharp drop in the number of COVID-related appointments, correlating with the vaccine roll-out and well-documented end to the early 2021 peak. As volume declined, we even removed a visible link at the top of our homepage to help patients find COVID-related services.

Then came the Delta variant. Last week alone, we saw a 540% increase in COVID-related appointments relative to June averages¹. Overall, we have seen our number of COVID-related appointments rise from ~5% June/early July to ~21% of the evaluated appointments — or a 300%+ increase. Other common booking category types such as cold/flu, UTIs, infections, mental health (anxiety/depression), dental, and allergy have all remained relatively consistent as an overall percentage of appointments during this time. It is somewhat curious that cold/flu-related appointments are flat as many of the covid symptoms might present themself as similar to a cold or flu — which may indicate more concern over COVID leading patients to select COVID-related services.

Our data also points to several regional COVID hotspots. We’ve observed the largest jumps in COVID-related appointments in Florida, Texas, and Georgia. The data from Florida is especially dramatic. Only 1% of Florida bookings during the week of June 14th were COVID-related, but last week, they jumped to 30%.

As we break down the data more, age becomes an interesting data point. There has been an increase in the percentage of total bookings across all age ranges, but we can mostly see the Delta variant disproportionately impacting younger people (who are also statistically less likely to be vaccinated). In particular, we observed a 350% increase in COVID-related bookings in the 35–50 age group, compared to an increase of 187% in the 50+ age group.

Sesame continues to serve patients with COVID and non-COVID health needs nationwide. We will share more insights in the coming weeks, hopefully with better news as the share of COVID-related services declines.

[1] In this data set, we removed prescription refill appointments, which are often booked on a regular cadence, to better understand time-based trends. We also removed the unclassified data to focus more on the known appointment types and complaints. We have also shared most of these numbers as a percentage of our overall bookings. Sesame has been growing quickly during this period, so percentages offered the clearest read .