Slight dip in positivity, hospital cases
Five counties still have ‘high’ transmission as state reports 22 more deaths, including incarcerated person
Connecticut reported slight decreases in its COVID-19 positivity rate, hospitalizations and rate of deaths Thursday.
Though experts say it’s difficult to project what comes next, particularly as the weather cools in the coming months and more activities move indoors, recent numbers show signs that Connecticut is beginning to recover from its recent delta variant surge.
Still, five of Connecticut’s eight counties currently have “high” COVID-19 transmission as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while 84 of its 169 towns qualified for the state’s “red alert” category.
Health officials continue to urge residents to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and to wear masks and maintain distance in indoor public places.
“We know that vaccine works, that it reduces the rate of transmission, but it should be combined with other things such as good ventilation, physical distancing and masking,” said Dr. Tom Balcezak, chief clinical officer at Yale New Haven Health. “We need to really start embedding in our processes the idea that one of those protective measure is simply not enough. We need multiple layers of protection, particularly against this delta variant.”
Gov. Ned Lamont and acting public health commissioner Dr. Deidre Gifford reported that recent COVID-19 clusters had included a summer camp, a group home and an outdoor party. The common threads in these outbreaks included inconsistent mask usage, prevalence of unvaccinated people and transmission to family members, they said.
Cases and positivity rate: Connecticut on Thursday reported 626 new COVID-19 cases out of 21,386 tests, for a positivity rate of 2.93%. The state’s seven-day positivity rate now stands at 2.88%, down significantly from the level recorded in August.
One reason for the decline is COVID-19 positivity rate is the resumption of regular testing of
asymptomatic college students.
According to the The Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, the state’s private colleges alone conducted more than 32,000 tests from Aug. 23-Sept. 5.
Still, there is strong reason to think Connecticut has seen a true decline in transmission.
The state has averaged 548 new COVID-19 cases a day over the past week, down from nearly 700 a day at one point in late August.
Hospitalizations: As of Thursday, Connecticut has 354 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, down 10 from Wednesday and the fewest at a time since Aug. 22.
After increasing for several months, hospitalizations have leveled off or even begun to decrease in recent weeks.
“The word we want to use today is steady,” Chris O’connor, president of Yale New Haven Health, said Thursday. “We remain pretty steady with our COVID activity.”
State data shows that although those unvaccinated against COVID-19 make up a small minority of Connecticut’s population, they account for about three-quarters of those hospitalized with the disease.
Balcezak said Thursday that many of the vaccinated people who are hospitalized with COVID19 at Yale New Haven were admitted for NON-COVID reasons and tested positive as part of a routine screening process. Few vaccinated people, he said, are experiencing severe symptoms.
“There’s no question that vaccine works, and those facts need to be out there so folks don’t think the delta variant emergence is a reason not to get vaccinated,” he said.
Deaths: Connecticut reported 22 coronavirus-linked deaths over the past week Thursday, down from 39 the week prior. The state has now recorded 8,416 COVID-19 deaths overall during the pandemic.
Among the recent deaths was a 78-year-old man who had been incarcerated at the Macdougall-walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, the state Department of Corrections said Thursday. He is the 20th incarcerated person in Connecticut to die of COVID-19 complications and the first since January.
Per DOC numbers, 4,726 incarcerated people in Connecticut have tested positive for COVID19 since the start of the pandemic, while 20 have died. As of Wednesday, 94 incarcerated people and 51 jail and prison staff members in Connecticut were recovering from COVID-19, according to the DOC.
The United States has now recorded 653,583 COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Vaccinations: As of Thursday, 74.4% of all Connecticut residents and 85.3% of those 12 and older had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, while 66.8% of all residents and 76.6% of those 12 and older were fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
Vaccine providers in Connecticut administered 46,304 doses from Aug. 29-Sept. 4, according to state numbers, down slightly from the week prior but up from earlier this summer.