Grading Conn.’s response to corona

We are residents of New Haven who, like most people, have been quarantined for over two months now and are watching with alarm as the deaths from COVID-19 in Connecticut continue to rise and currently stand at over 3,800. One of us is originally from Uruguay, a small country in South America, while the other was born in Israel. Uruguay’s population is roughly equivalent to Connecticut’s 3.5 million, and, to date, there have been only 20 deaths attributed to COVID there. Israel has about 9 million residents and it reports only 280 deaths from the virus.

One way to make sense of Connecticut’s death toll from the coronavirus is to compare our state’s response to that of Uruguay and Israel. The first case of the virus in Uruguay was reported on March 13 when we were there for a family visit. As it turned out, many of the initial cases were traced back to a woman who flew into the country from northern Italy, which was a hot spot at the time, and had gone to a party in Montevideo attended by hundreds of people. Once the infections were discovered, Uruguay acted swiftly and decisively including sealing its borders to travelers from Europe, closing schools and nonessential businesses, and mandating quarantine for all. Personal and accurate contact tracing was coordinated by the government and returning residents were informed at the airport about what they needed to do (an infected friend returning from Milan was told that she was number 26).

Israel already in mid-February closed off its borders to residents of China and

South Korea, and as the virus spread to Europe, it added countries like Italy and Spain to the list. In addition, Israeli citizens who visited these countries were required to self-quarantine for two weeks upon their return. The Health Ministry announced that it would criminally prosecute residents that failed to follow these rules. When the cases started to rise in Israel in March, schools, businesses and parks were immediately closed and the entire population was required to quarantine at home. Residents were only allowed to leave their homes to buy necessities and even walking one’s dog was monitored by the police. In April, during the Passover holidays, the police closed the major transportation highways so that people in Jerusalem could not go to visit their families in Tel-Aviv or Haifa, thereby limiting the spread of the virus.

On top of the aggressive responses of the Israeli and the Uruguayan governments once the first cases of the virus were detected, both countries have a national health care system that covers all of their residents. Thus, Israel’s hospitals were well prepared to handle the growing number of infections in March and April, which currently stand at just under 17,000; Connecticut, by way of comparison has close to 40,000 infections with about a third of the population. In Uruguay, the hospitals were never even close to capacity with corona patients given that it has had only about 750 infections. We suspect that one of the reasons for the low infection rates in Uruguay is that doctors routinely make visits to residents’ homes rather than requiring them to go to the emergency room, thereby reducing the chance of further infections.

Unlike the responses to the coronavirus outbreak of both Uruguay and Israel, Connecticut was relatively slow and hesitant in its response to the virus. For example, when we returned to the United States from visiting Uruguay in mid-March, businesses like gyms, movie theaters and restaurants were only beginning to close. Many of the essential stores remained open and initially did not require customers to wear masks or maintain social distancing, which they did only weeks later. In addition, in March, there was not enough testing and contact tracing of Connecticut residents to really make a difference in reducing the infection rates. Finally, the state was not proactive enough in preventing potential infections among vulnerable populations like nursing home patients and their caretakers.

So what accounts for the different death rates and infections from the coronavirus when comparing Connecticut to both Uruguay and Israel? Frankly speaking, we cannot know for sure; we suspect that part of the difference has to do with the delayed and feeble response of our state’s government in comparison to the proactive and aggressive measures taken in Uruguay and Israel. We believe that this difference is also related to the fact that the residents of Uruguay and Israel tend to be healthier and have better diets than their Connecticut counterparts. Perhaps we will never know the answer with certainty, but it is definitely a question worth asking.