Hospitals seeing more young people with virus
Doctor says increase likely related to transmissibility of UK variant
Yale New Haven Hospital has seen a 25% increase in COVID-19 cases in the past two weeks, and its patients are skewing younger — including a 21-year-old whowas admitted last week and had to be placed on a ventilator.
“There are now two pediatric patients in our ICU with COVID. I don’t think we have seen that since early April [2020],” said Dr. Thomas Balcezak, the chief clinical officer for Yale New Haven Health. Overall, there are six pediatric COVID patients, he said.
“It’s really hitting a much younger population, much harder than it has in either the first wave or through the wave ending in late December,” Balcezak said Tuesday during a biweekly news conference. “I agree with Marna [Borgstrom, CEO of Yale New Haven Health], which is, I think it has to do with the increased transmissibility of this U.K. variant.”
Borgstrom said as of Tuesday morning Yale had 208 COVID-19 patients across its hospital system, an increase of 43 from just two weeks ago. She said that 44 of those patients are under the age of 45.
Yale New Haven Hospital has 138 of those patients. Two weeks ago they had fewer than 100 patients. She said Bridgeport Hospital has 41 patients and Greenwich Hospital has 21, which is also a significant increase.
“We have an under-vaccinated or unvaccinated group with a strain of the SARS-COVID virus that is much more infectious than the original strain, and I think that those two things are contributing to the increase,” Borgstrom said.
The state’s overall numbers also showed another jump Tuesday in the percentage of positive tests to 5.2%, one of the highest rates in weeks. Overall, there are 518 people in the hospital for COVID in Connecticut, an increase of 20 in one day, according to data released by the state Department of Public Health.
At a press conference Tuesday, Gov. Ned Lamont said officials are watching the numbers closely, particularly the spike in fatalities in
court records. Thody also ordered an evaluation of Freeto’s fitness for duty, something he’s only done two other times in his two years leading the department.
On Jan. 14, police leaders referred their findings to the department’s detective division to begin a parallel criminal investigation. Freeto remained on paid administrative leave throughout the investigations and left the department through an involuntary “administrative separation” on March 19 after he ultimately failed the fitness for duty evaluation, Thody said.
The department completed its criminal investigation and applied for a warrant four days later, according to Thody.
The affidavit outlines how Freeto used the federal and state police databases to look up the license plates of 28 personal vehicles parked at the department headquarters, accessing his fellow officers’ names, dates of birth, home addresses, driver’s license numbers and other vehicles registered to those people.
Between late April 2018 and Dec. 14, 2020, he searched several of those officers multiple times and his own information 14 times, the records show.
Freeto has been certified to use the NCIC and Connecticut databases since 2002, undergoing a required training every two years that states officers are prohibited from using the systems for “personal reason or curiosity,” according to the affidavit. None of the officers Freeto looked up were the subject of official police business that would merit running their personal information, the affidavit concluded.
In one instance, investigators found Freeto surreptitiously ran the license plate of a new female officer after driving past her in the department’s parking lot near the end of his shift on May 3, 2020.
Video surveillance from that morning shows Freeto driving his marked cruiser into the rear parking lot and past the officer as she gets out of her personal vehicle and heads toward the building, according to the affidavit. He parks near his own personal car and unloads his police equipment into it while the other officer walks toward the building, according to a description of the video. Freeto then gets back in his cruiser and circles back to the officer’s personal vehicle, searching her license plate on his in-cruiser computer as he drives by her car and into another area of the parking garage, the affidavit states.
The court records released Wednesday do not indicate what, if anything, Freeto did with the personal information he accessed about fellow officers. Freeto could not be reached Wednesday. He was released after his arrest on a written promise to appear at an arraignment scheduled for the end of June in Superior Court in Hartford.
Thody said he understands the arrest may shake community trust in law enforcement but that he is committed to holding officers to a higher standard of accountability than past administrations have done.
“I wish I could say that we will never find another example of misconduct in the department but I think that’s unlikely,” Thody said Wednesday. “I think what we’re trying to do here is create a culture where that misconduct is dealt with swiftly, and that’s another challenge, making these processes go quicker. We’ve been struggling with that for years.”
Disciplinary history
Freeto has a long disciplinary history within the department, including multiple instances last summer and another ongoing internal investigation started just before he was placed on leave, according to city records.
But Freeto also has fired back at administrators, claiming he has been harassed by supervisors and passed over for promotion to sergeant by Thody in retaliation for making multiple complaints to human resources, records show.
In the second half of 2020 alone, Freeto wasfound to have been insubordinate to a sergeant in June and to have improperly investigated a call in July, Thody said. Alieutenant also reported an “odd” interaction with Freeto in December, Thody said, sparking yet another internal investigation just days before the department received the NCIC report that became the basis of the criminal case against Freeto. Those incidents caused Thody to question whether Freeto could “properly and safely perform his duties” and contributed to his decision to order a fitness for duty evaluation, he said.
Thody previously declined to promote Freeto from officer to sergeant in early 2020, which Freeto later described as “unjust” in an August email to the city’s Human Resources department, according to internal records provided to the the Courant by a city official.
Freeto’s email was following up on a complaint he made in July that claimed multiple supervisors were retaliating against him for filing an earlier complaint with the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.
“I continue to be constantly picked on; embarrassed and humiliated in front of coworkers; and regularly treated unfairly,” Freeto wrote in the July complaint. “I’m truly concerned for mywell-being and both myphysical and emotional safety.”
Further documentation about Freeto’s disciplinary history was not immediately available Wednesday.
The internal investigation into Freeto’s interaction with the lieutenant in December is still ongoing and further information could not be released publicly, Thody said.