New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Lamont, doctors caution COVID not over
Despite public behavior that includes few people wearing masks, Gov. Ned Lamont and Connecticut health officials caution that the COVID-19 pandemic is not over.
Though COVID cases and hospitalizations had been declining in Connecticut, recent increases have raised some concern about the BA.2 subvariant, which drove surges in other parts of the world.
“If you remember from 1918, you could see that there were ripples that went on for maybe five, even 10 years,” Lamont said during a Wednesday news conference. “My instinct is, we’re gonna have some ripples. I think what’s coming out of Britain is a ripple. I worry a little bit about what happens in the fall.”
An additional 2,621 COVID cases were identified in Connecticut over the previous seven days, out of 54,962 reported tests, for a positivity rate of 4.77 percent, according to state data released Wednesday. In the past week, the state saw an increase of 19 patients in Connecticut hospitals with COVID infections for a total of 117.
“We are definitely not ready to call the ‘all clear,’ ” said Patrick Charmel, president and chief executive officer of Griffin Hospital. “Obviously, the positivity rate is down. But it’s at 4 percent. We used to say that the threshold for concern is 3 percent. We’re above that right now. We’re hoping that it doesn’t return to the teens where it was during the last wave, which occurred from December to February. We need to stay diligent.”
State Sen. Saud Anwar, D-East Hartford, a practicing physician, used the term “cyclical resurgence.”
“This disease is not necessarily endemic, but it’s a cyclical resurgence, because the virus is changing,” said Anwar, acting co-chair of the public health committee.
New tools, including antiviral medications designed specifically to fight the coronavirus, have allowed society and medical professionals to adapt to the virus as it changes, Awar said.
“That gives us the ability to be able to live within the virus in the current form,” Anwar said. “So is it still a pandemic? In our view, it is.”
Dr. Thomas Balcezak, chief clinical officer for Yale New Haven Health, said a pandemic is widespread, unchecked spread of the virus, and that is still occurring across the globe.
“Until that ends, it will still be a pandemic. Our expectation in the health care world, is as it moves out of the widespread, unchecked spread phase — the pandemic phase — there will be sporadic flare-ups, if you will, of cases … that’s when it will be declared endemic,” Balcezak said.
Charmel, speaking after an event with Lamont where few people wore masks, said sometimes the reality inside hospitals does not match behavior outside emergency rooms.
“To be honest with you, that was a concern on the part of health care providers during this last wave, that society was acting like it was over,” he said. “But if you were in a hospital (emergency department) or in an ICU, it looked like it did at the beginning of the pandemic, and that was just four weeks ago.”
Charmel said the safety that comes with being up-to-date on COVID vaccinations provides that sense of freedom.
“I think people who are vaccinated are boosted, like everybody in this room, feel that they’re protected,” he said. “And what we’re doing is saying, ‘Hey, you can have more freedom if you go out and get vaccinated and boosted and you don’t have to be as isolated as you were at the beginning.’”
Anwar said that while medicine has adapted to the changing disease, that does not mean the danger is completely past.
“Is it as deadly as it was? No. And is it changing? Yes, it is. And is it changing in the way that it’s more tolerable? Yes, it is,” he said. “But can it change to become ugly again? I, the doctor in me in the ICU, I have to be very vigilant and ready for that. So I’m not resting.”