New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘We’re not there. Yet’
Experts: Rolling back restrictions may cause a CT COVID surge
Gov. Ned Lamont’s decision to loosen COVID-19 restrictions has experts concerned about an increase in coronavirus cases and possibly deaths.
“I am concerned that we, yet again, have lulled ourselves into a false belief that we have gotten SARSCoV-2 under control,” Nathan Grubaugh said on Twitter. “We’re getting close — much closer, in fact — but we’re not there. Yet.”
Grubaugh, assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases studying disease transmission and evolution, is one of several specialists concerned that the decision to roll back COVID-19 restrictions in Connecticut could put the state at risk.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, told National Public Radio Wednesday that although cases are dropping, the pandemic is not over yet.
“I think the next two or three months could go in one of two directions,”
Walensky said on NPR following the Texas governor’s decision to rescind that state’s mask mandate. “If things open up, if we’re not really cautious, we could end up with a postspring break surge the way we saw a post-Christmas surge. We could see much more disease. We could see much more death. In an alternative vision, I see we really hunker down for a couple of more months, we get so many people vaccinated and we get to a really great place by summer.”
Lamont announced Thursday that capacity limits will be lifted for restaurants and other businesses, though social-distancing rules and mask mandates will still be in effect.
Under the new rules, social and recreational gatherings will be limited to 25 people indoors and
100 people outdoors. Sports teams will be allowed to practice and compete again, and venues will be allowed to include 100 people indoors and 200 outdoors.
The loosened restrictions take effect on March 19.
“I think Connecticut has earned it,” Lamont said.
Those rules are changing, however, as a more transmissible strain of the coronavirus is expected to become dominant in the state.
The U.K. strain, also known as B.1.1.7, is as much as 90 percent more transmissible than strains currently in circulation, according to one international team of researchers.
That study, published this week in the journal Science, focused on coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom, where the B.1.1.7 variant was initially identified.
“Without stringent control measures, including limited closure of educational institutions and a greatly accelerated vaccine rollout, COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths across England in 2021 will exceed those in 2020,” the study says.
“I think the concern right now is that these actions are being taken, perhaps even a few weeks too soon,” said Rick Martinello, medical director for infection prevention at both Yale New Haven Hospital and Yale New Haven Health. “The risk that we take with that, is that if we see these variants, especially the U.K. variant, really take hold and be uncontrolled in the state of Connecticut, letting up too early increases our risk for having to go back into a more restrictive lockdown.”
The United States has 2,506 known cases of the U.K. variant, with 42 of them found so far in Connecticut, though Martinello believes that is a low estimate. Grubaugh, whose team at Yale has been sequencing coronavirus samples and monitoring the variant’s spread, estimated that it was in about 25 percent of all samples, and growing.
“Reopening Connecticut on [March 19] is a terrible idea,” he said Thursday on Twitter. “We estimate that B.1.1.7 frequency was [about] 25 percent at the end of last week, and will reach 50 percent by March 10 and 75 percent by March 28.”
That reality also raised concerns for Pedro
Mendes, a disease modeler at UConn and John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington.
“So the dangerous strain is growing while we will relax distancing measures,” he said. “At least they kept the mask mandates in place.”
Mendes said we can’t know the effect of Lamont’s decision to rollback COVID restrictions until at least two weeks after those changes take effect.
The vaccines being administered across the state are not 100 percent effective at preventing serious illness or at stopping transmission of the virus, and their efficacy against the B.1.1.7 variant, and other variants, is still unknown.
At last count, 21.4 percent of the state has been vaccinated at least once, which Mendes said was good progress. Lamont Thursday pointed to continually dropping hospitalizations as a factor that encouraged him to make this decision.
“Our hospitalization is down,” Lamont said Thursday. “We thought this is something we know we can do safely, we know it works, and maintaining the masks and the social distancing reinforces that we still know we have a way to go.”
“I can’t mandate common sense, so people are going to use their judgment,” Lamont said.
While Martinello said coronavirus hospitalizations are down, he said it’s unknown how the next few weeks will go.
“We never know exactly where we’re where we’re going to be, until we’re almost there,” he said.
“This last week, we’ve really had some mixed signals.”
Mendes agreed the drop in hospitalizations is a good sign, though he did foresee a possibility that the variant will spread faster than the state can vaccinate enough people to stop transmission.
“The good news is that the lower we can get in infections and hospitalizations before the B.117 starts becoming widespread, the better we can weather the (likely) new surge of infections that will cause,” he said.