State needs more doses to reach vaccination goals

Experts forecast further improvement, say worst of surge may have passed

An official at Connecticut’s largest health care system says an increase in doses is urgently needed if the state hopes to achieve mass vaccination this summer.

Connecticut’s COVID-19 numbers continue to show mild signs of improvement, state data shows, as experts say the worst of the state’s coronavirus outbreak may finally have passed.

Gov. Ned Lamont announced 1,915 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday out of 30,641 tests, for a positive test rate of 6.3%. Connecticut’s seven-day positivity rate now stands at 5.25%, down from Tuesday and the lowest it has been since early December.

Meanwhile, the state has 1,124 patients currently hospitalized with COVID-19, down 17 from Tuesday. New Haven County continues to lead the state in coronavirus hospitalizations, followed by Hartford County and then Fairfield County.

Pedro Mendes, a computational biologist who runs a COVID-19 model for UConn Health, said Connecticut appears to be on the downward side of its curve, though he warned that progress in overcoming the disease will likely remain gradual.

“We’ve gone over a peak around late December,” Mendes said. “It has been slowing down.”

Mendes said his model predicts Connecticut to have 841 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 three weeks from now, a decrease of about 25%. Longer-term, he said, the scale of Connecticut’s outbreak will depend on whether vaccine distribution outpaces the spread of new, more contagious coronavirus variants.

Dr. Tom Balcezak, chief clinical officer at Yale New Haven Health, noted that wastewater analysis from the Yale School of Public Health currently shows slightly lower COVID-19 prevalence across much of the state.

“Right now it’s looking like it’s relatively

stable to slightly down,” Balcezak said. “So if you were asking me to take a bet, I would think that our number of inpatient cases — which lags behind [wastewater data] by about a week to 10 days — a week from now I think we’ll be slightly down.”

Balcezak emphasized that he was only speculating and that predicting the trajectory of COVID19 remains difficult. Several times during the current coronavirus wave, Connecticut’s metrics have appeared to improve, only to increase again soon after.

For now, COVID-19 continues to have severe consequences throughout the state. Lamont on Wednesday announced 44 additional coronavirus-linked deaths, bringing Connecticut’s total to 6,726 during the pandemic. Though the rate of deaths has slowed slightly, the state has still recorded 190 over the past week and 726 so far in January.

Nationally, COVID-19 numbers have leveled off slightly in recent days, with the total number of hospitalizations due the disease beginning to decrease. In addition to Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and others in the Northeast have reported fewer cases lately than earlier in the winter.

The United States has now recorded 404,284 COVID-19 deaths, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Connecticut continues to rank among the national leaders in vaccine distribution, with about 6% of the state having received at least one dose. Only Alaska, West Virginia and North Dakota have so far vaccinated a higher percentage of their populations.

Still, state and hospital officials have clamored for more doses from the federal government, which would allow them to speed distribution.

“We have the staff, we have the technology, we have the nurses, we have the pharmacists. What we need is vaccine,” Balcezak said. “As we scale up, we are going to need 10-fold the number of doses that we are currently receiving.”

Connecticut has thus far received about 46,000 vaccine first doses a week, far fewer than will be necessary to quickly vaccinate the estimated 1.4 million people in Phase 1B of its distribution plan, let alone all state residents who desire a vaccine.