Virus continues to stress health care facilities

As another 39 people were reported hospitalized with the coronavirus on Wednesday, the strain on the state’s health care workers is worsening, officials say

There were 2,290 new COVID-19 cases reported out of 30,279 cases for a daily positivity rate of 7.56. There were 43 more deaths associated with the disease and there are now 1,262 patients hospitalized.

“The workforce problems are substantial,” said Dr. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale University school of public health. “A lot of nursing home employees work two jobs. We have a bit of a shortage of infection control specialists.”

Private health providers are not the only ones strapped. The state’s own workforce has also been “stripped back for years,” Vermund said, due to lack of funding.

“We were in no position to do contact tracing back in March and April,” Vermund said. “The state started contact tracing in Fairfield County and gave up within weeks because they were overwhelmed and they had to redeploy their disease intervention specialists to higher priority tasks.”

Yale ended up taking over contact tracing for New Haven as well as the Yale community, he said.

Connecticut’s numbers have spiked in recent days. On Tuesday, the state’s one-day positivity rate hit 8.6 percent as more than 2,400 new cases were recorded.

“This is consistent with what we’ve spoken about and prior to the Thanksgiving holiday and what we expected to be,” said Keith Grant, senior system director of infection prevention at Hartford HealthCare.

“With that being said, this is also consistent to times before when the mortality rate also shifted up,” he added.

SEIU 1199, a health care workers union with members in Connecticut and Rhode Island, has raised concerns about the amount of mandatory overtime hours faced by nursing home workers.

As demand for testing has increased, the National Guard has been called to help some locations.

That comes as Connecticut is waiting for emergency authorization of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNtech.

A national poll conducted by Quinnipiac University in Hamden showed 61 percent of respondents said they would be willing to be vaccinated. Another 33 percent said they are likely not to get vaccinated.

As for when people said they would take a vaccine, 37 percent said they wanted it as soon as possible. Forty-one percent said they would wait a few months, and 20 percent said they would never get vaccinated.

On Wednesday, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield announced it was preparing a team of students, faculty and local volunteers to serve as a vaccine distribution “strike force.”

SHU is also considering to serve as a regional distribution site for the vaccine “as it has the space and facilities to assist in such an operation,” according to a statement from the school.

As COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have surged in recent weeks, a group of health care workers, many associated with Yale, have urged Gov. Ned Lamont to halt indoor dining at restaurants and to close gyms.

But on Wednesday, the governor said he has no immediate plans for further restrictions.

When asked about rollbacks in other states, including Massachusetts, Lamont said some of those restrictions have brought those states more in line with Connecticut.

For instance, Massachusetts’s rollback meant decreasing capacity at gyms from 50 percent (which was allowed in some lowactivity areas) to 40 percent. Connecticut recently reduced gym capacity from 50 percent to 25 percent.