Data: 10% of state’s vaccinated population have gotten COVID booster

With boosters now widely available for all three vaccines, the latest figures show that about 10 percent of Connecticut’s fully vaccinated population has received an additional dose.

The latest figures show Connecticut is in line with the national average for booster administration several weeks into the rollout, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As of Sunday, 246,133 additional doses have been administered in Connecticut, CDC data shows. The majority of those doses have been PfizerBioNTech, which received approval for a booster several weeks before Moderna and Johnson & Johnson.

The latest figures show that 191,695 additional doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been administered, while providers in the state have provided 53,710 additional Moderna doses and 714 additional doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Eligibility for Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech boosters was limited to everyone age 65 and older, along with people working and living in settings that put them at risk, and those with certain medical conditions, providing they had completed their initial two-dose regime at least six months earlier.

Federal regulators offered a much broader eligibility for the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Anyone age 18 and older could get a booster of that vaccine if they had received the first dose at least two months earlier.

But federal regulators also opened up the possibility for people to seek a booster from a different manufacturer in a situation they call “mix and match.” For example, an individual who received a Johnson & Johnson vaccine could seek a Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech booster. The figures do not discern if doses were used for this purpose.

With eligibility skewed largely toward those age 65 and older, the percent of fully vaccinated people in this group who received a booster was considerably higher, according to CDC data. As of Sunday, nearly 30 percent of fully vaccinated residents in this age group had received a booster — slightly higher than the national average.

The booster rollout comes amid declining COVID-19 metrics in Connecticut. Overall new infections, the positivity rate of COVID-19 tests and hospitalizations have been trending downward through the last month following a spike in the late summer spurred by the highly transmissible delta variant.

Through the weekend, an additional 832 cases of COVID-19 were discovered among 50,606 tests for a positivity rate of 1.62 percent, according to the state. Hospitalizations increased by a net of 15 patients for a total of 205.

Amid the new efforts to administer boosters, the overall vaccination rate has been slowly rising. According to the CDC, 81.1 percent of all eligible residents in Connecticut are now fully vaccinated — one of the highest rates in the country.

This week, the CDC is expected to weigh whether children age 5 to 11 should receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after approval last week by the Food and Drug Administration.

This group, according to state estimates, is roughly 278,000 Connecticut residents.