State care rate surges

Hospitalizations at highest level since mid-June; Lamont warns of spreading

COVID-19 hospitalizations in Connecticut have risen to their highest level in nearly four months, state numbers showed Monday.

Connecticut currently has 155 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, up 21 from Friday and more than twice the number reported as recently as two weeks ago. The state hadn’t previously recorded so many hospitalizations at a given time since June 19, when it was still recovering from a devastating spring surge.

Monday’s increase in hospitalizations was not concentrated in any particular area of the state but was instead spread across several regions. Fairfield County leads Connecticut with 42 hospitalized patients, followed by Hartford (38), New Haven (36) and New London (25).

Gov. Ned Lamont announced 1,066 positive results on 77,261 COVID19 tests since Friday, for a rate of 1.4%. Though Connecticut’s raw number of new cases has continued to increase in recent weeks, its positivity rate has seemed to stabilize between 1 and 1.5% — higher than the state experienced over the summer but lower than that of many other states.

At an appearance Monday in New London, Lamont warned of increased COVID-19 spread at “informal social events.”

“That’s where we’ve got to the track and trace, that’s where weneed families to be particularly careful,” he said.

Connecticut has increased its COVID-19 testing in recent weeks, likely in part due to an influx of rapid-response tests from the federal government. The state has reported 147,052 tests in the past week, the most of any seven-day period during the pandemic.

Lamont announced an additional two coronavirus-linked deaths Monday,

bringing Connecticut’s total during the pandemic to 4,532. The United States has now recorded 214,985 COVID-19 deaths, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.