State’s COVID death decline leads most states. Why?

For the first time since Oct. 13, the state is reporting one death from COVID-19 on Wednesday. And while every human who utters that number — starting with Gov. Ned Lamont late in the morning — quickly adds that it’s still one too many, it represents a quiet triumph for Connecticut.

Since the beginning of January, when the earliest second vaccination doses reached arms, Connecticut has seen its death rate fall faster than just about all other states, well ahead of

the declines in our neighboring states.

This is happening even as the number of people in Connecticut hospitals climbed by more than one-third in the last two weeks, and as the closely watched positive test rate has crept up. Connecticut, in fact, stood in the No. 4 position Wednesday among all states in new infections per 100,000 people over the last seven days — behind only Michigan, New York and New Jersey.

But the state is also in the No. 38 position in deaths per 100,000, according to the New York Times, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Not bad, considering Connecticut started the year 50 percent higher than the nation in deaths and over the last few days has seen residents die at less than half the national rate.

How can this be?

A few forces may be at work but in a word, it comes down to Lamont’s vaccination priorities. By sticking with age as the overriding factor in deciding who gets to roll up a sleeve for the magic juice first — defying CDC recommendations and standing virtually alone among states — Lamont put Connecticut in an early and lasting lead when it comes to vaccinating people age 65 and over.

This isn’t complicated. Despite the well-meaning cries of foul from patients and advocates for people with any number of medical conditions, and people in front-line jobs such as grocery clerks and retail workers, the fact remains that COVID-19 takes the lives of old people overwhelmingly.

Among 7,886 Connecticut residents who have died, 179 were under age 50.

And so, the strategy has worked, at least when it comes to preventing deaths. The numbers are irrefutable. We’re down to a seven-day average of just over five deaths a day, or 1.4 per million residents, compared with three in the nation as a whole; just over five per million in Massachusetts; and hovering around four in both New York and New Jersey.

“The age-based strategy is the right strategy for Connecticut,” Dr. Ajay Kumar, chief medical officer at Hartford HealthCare, the group that includes St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, told me Wednesday. “Age is a strong correlation here, so our age-based strategy meets that goal ... I truly agree with that.”

Kumar and Dr. Tom Balcezak, the chief medical officer at Yale New Haven Health, both advised the state in the tough decisions by Lamont to go with age, along with teachers, other school employees and health care workers including everyone in nursing homes.

Now Kumar and Balcezak both report their systems are seeing significantly higher numbers of middle-aged and even younger in-patients with COVID. They are sick, to be sure, but with rare exceptions, they’re not dying.

And at Yale New Haven Health, a new report Wednesday showed the mortality rates fell for most age groups and rose for no groups in the weeks from Feb. 7 to March 27, compared with Dec. 27 to Feb. 6. Among people 75 and older, the number of deaths fell from an average of 12 per week to 3.3 and the death rate among people that age who were admitted fell by nearly one-third, to 10 percent.

That reflects better treatment methods and the vaccinations. Of course, the rise of younger patients is a concern. It’s possible Lamont’s decision to lift some restrictions is contributing to that rise, though that’s debatable and he remains adamant about masks and distancing.

“It’s an important warning to young people that you can still get sick enough to go to the hospital,” said Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer and point person for the vaccinations.

Still, Kumar and other medical experts say they don’t expect to see rising deaths among young people.

Lamont, after announcing the one daily death at an event at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, talked with me about the lower fatality rates.

“Right after we did the age announcement, I heard from a lot of governors and they said, ‘I wish we could do this but I’m already too far down the road trying to decide who’s essential and who’s not, and whose comorbidity is more severe than others,’ ” Lamont recounted.

It wasn’t just that Connecticut made older people a priority; it’s that simplifying the vaccinations let providers focus on injections rather than rejections of people fighting for a place on line — speeding inoculations for everyone.

Still, they fight. Just this week, on Tuesday, Disability Rights Connecticut, an advocacy group, filed a formal complaint with the civil rights office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “to require Connecticut to revise its discriminatory plan to allow hospitals to decide, without any uniform statewide policy and procedures, who will be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine as of April 1.”

Every Connecticut resident is eligible to make an appointment as of 12:01 a.m. Thursday. The complaint, reflecting earlier criticism of the vaccine order, refers to a list of five medical conditions that health care providers will consider as a nonbinding priority.

The complaint should be dismissed. Lamont rebuffed the notion that the list was arbitrary.

“We talked to every single chief medical officer in the state, we asked who was at risk, ‘Who would you think should be in the fast-lane?’” Lamont said in response to the formal complaint. “And by the way, everybody is eligible tomorrow. We’ve got 12 hours to go.’ ”

He added, “The CDC list included everybody so it was no help at all.”

And yet, only Connecticut and Maine have not given special priority to people with certain medical conditions, according to a New York Times chart of all states’ policies. And only a small handful of states, including Connecticut, have not given priority to food workers.

Brutal as it seems, the decision saved lives. Could Connecticut have prevented even more deaths?

We remain in the the top tier among all states in total deaths per 1 million residents, at No. 7 according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, because of the tragic carnage in nursing homes last spring.

Vaccination in Black and Latinx communities has lagged in every state, including this one, despite significant outreach. Those two racial minority groups, especially African Americans, have seen higher death rates at younger ages.

The state’s 17 community health care providers petitioned the state to allow them to vaccinate their entire patient populations, not just the eligible age groups, but were spurned. Three times I urged in columns that urban and non-white residents should receive vaccines regardless of age.

We’ll never know whether that strategy would have saved more lives. This much we know: The path Connecticut took, aiming at age groups above all else, did prevent many deaths, perhaps well into the hundreds.