Hospitals near capacity as CT COVID-19 cases climb

Nearly all of the beds at two Connecticut hospitals are full and the Intensive Care Units are close to capacity at two other hospitals as the COVID effects are taking a firmer grip on the state.

Over the last several days, Connecticut has surpassed all northeast states except Rhode Island and Delaware in new cases per million people, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

As the cases have been rising, 78 percent of all Connecticut hospital beds are now occupied and 59 percent of ICU beds are full, according to Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer.

“Of those, 36 percent of the state’s ICU beds are occupied by COVID patients,” he said.

“It is worth pointing out that that’s a statewide average. When you go look at an individual hospital, there are certainly some that have much higher percentages than the statewide averages as you’d expect, and some that have much lower averages.”

As of Thursday, Stamford Hospital and St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury both stood at around 90 percent total occupancy, the highest in the state.

Manchester Memorial Hospital reported around 90 percent occupancy of its ICU beds, while St. Francis Hospital in Hartford reported 92 percent.

While there were 48 fewer COVID hospitalizations reported on Thursday, the amount of deaths associated with the disease increased by nearly the same number.

State health officials recorded 42 more deaths from the disease, bringing the statewide death toll to 5,327.

But Geballe pointed out that only about half of the deaths attributed to the virus occur in hospitals. “And then that usually is a small portion relative to the number of healthy discharges that occur from the hospital,” he said.

The number of people hospitalized for the illness now stands at 1,214.

There were 2,431 new COVID cases Thursday found in 36,659 tests for a daily positivity rate of 6.63 percent. The sevenday positivity rate hovers just below 7 percent.

Asked whether contact tracing showed links to Thanksgiving gatherings, Gov. Ned Lamont pointed to rising infections.

“Obviously, the infections have gone up, especially over the last week or so,” the governor said. Some of that could be related to gatherings over the Thanksgiving holiday, he said, or could be associated with the “thousands” of college students coming home or leaving the state ahead of the holiday .

That comes as the U.S. reported Wednesday there were more than 3,000 new deaths in a day for the first time, shattering previous records, according to the COVID Tracking Project.