Conn. turning the COVID corner

The question I had for Dr. Tom Balcezak was whether he believes we’ve peaked and started to decline in the severity of this latest coronavirus surge. But first, an update on how the staff is faring at Yale New Haven Health, the hospital system where he’s chief medical officer.

“People are tired. They’re just tired of this,” he said — although no one is about to let up, he didn’t need to say. “They want to go back to their lives … These people have been working incredibly hard and it’s tough.”

Then he added, “They don’t want to be heroes anymore.”

As the horrible year of 2020 winds down, we’re still not ready to relieve health care workers of their status as saviors and return to a normal life of basketball stars as humanoid gods.

But in Connecticut at least, a close and broad look at the numbers shows we’ve turned a corner. The surge that started in mid-September has peaked and begun to move in the right direction.

We see it in a 10 percent

decline in the number of people in hospitals. We see it in the rate of positive tests falling below 6 percent on Wednesday — just barely — for the first time since early December.

The caveat: No one can predict the coronavirus. It can pop back up after the Christmas and New Year’s weekends when people come together.

“We’re definitely on the downside of this wave,” Balcezak said. “Whether it continues on the down slope depends very much on the behavior of people for the next 10 days.”

Looking across the data and at other signals — on Wednesday, for example, Gov. Ned Lamont said definitively there’s no need for new restrictions — we can now see that experts who predicted a peak sometime between late December and late January were right.

It’s happening at the early end of those forecasts that were made by people such as Dr. Albert Ko of the Yale School of Public Health. It’s tenuous but it’s happening.

We don’t know how long it will take to return to normal, nor even whether the late 2020 surge will be the last one — though the vaccine rollouts should at worst muffle another surge.

But down is better than up, and most important, it appears we will not see this what we feared this winter: Hospital numbers over 2,000 people, positive death rates in the 10 percent range and deaths over 300 a week.

A trend emerges

Even if we are past the peak, many more people will die or get sick before we see numbers like we had last summer in Connecticut. Mike Wacek, a very close watcher of the data in his role as chief risk officer at a Stamford-based insurance group, put it bluntly.

“I do think there’s reason for optimism,” Wacek said Wednesday, “but cases do remain high. They’re among the highest in the country and maybe in the world, well above the UK where they are panicking.”

The United Kingdom, which Wacek tracks, saw a dramatic, 40 percent drop in cases in 18 days in November, only to shoot back up. So keep your mask on and keep your distance.

The 10 percent decline in the number of people currently in hospitals with COVID-19 represents a consistent and objective measure of how hard the illness is gripping the state. The number stood at 1,155 on Wednesday, down from the Dec. 15 peak of 1,269.

It’s down seven of the last

10 weekdays after just one down day in all of November — marking the first sustained decline in the hospital count since the low of 42 on Aug. 16.

The seven-day average number of new confirmed and suspected cases has fallen to just over 1,900 per day in Connecticut as of Wednesday, down from a high of 2,700 for a few days in the second week of December. That’s partly because the number of new tests is slightly down, but the percent of people testing positive is also on the decline.

That positive test rate,

5.98 percent on Wednesday, reached a 7-day average of 7 percent on Dec. 11.

We did have declines in the number of cases and the positive test rate in the last week of November, only to see both climb back up. But in that dip, the hospital number kept climbing.

This time around we’re seeing other hopeful signs, such as the virus in wastewater. Yale’s engineering school measures effluent in the cities and towns Yale New Haven Health serves. That’s considered an advance indicator of what’s to come a week or two in the future

“All of them are stable to decreasing,” Balcezak said.

‘Not myself yet’

The measure that matters most — deaths — remains high and has not turned a corner. That’s what we expect, as death, being the final act, is the last measure to come around.

In the spring, for example, Connecticut and New York both saw the number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 peak in the third week of April, while deaths continued to climb sharply until Memorial Day.

We’re still seeing the seven-day average number of daily deaths in Connecticut climb, into the 30s for most of December. But the speed of that increase is slowing.

Epidemiologists for the state Department of Public Health declined through a spokeswoman to say whether they view the recent declines in hospitalizations and positive test percentages as a sign that deaths will fall as well. But Lamont has sounded optimistic this week as he talks about the numbers.

Comparing Connecticut to the nation is dicey because states measure COVID-19 cases differently. For example, it’s been reported by my colleagues at Hearst and other media outlets that the Connecticut death rate per million residents — over 60 in the week that ended Monday — is higher than the national rate. But other states don’t count every suspected COVID death as a COVID death, instead saying on death certificates that a victim died of pneumonia.

Looking at the nation as a whole, it’s hard to see a peak and turnaround like we see in Connecticut, as the surge gains momentum in one region, then another. Hospitalizations are still rising and the positive test rate has been steady at more than 11 percent for the better part of December.

So the national nightmare is not over. At Yale New Haven Health, about

13 percent of the 984 admitted patients age 70 or older between Oct. 15 and this past Monday died. That’s tragic but it’s an improvement over the 26 percent who died last spring in that same age group.

The good news is that nursing homes are not seeing anywhere close to the number of deaths they saw in the spring — even though the overwhelming majority of deaths, last spring as well as this fall, have been among older adults.

Barbara Beitch is one who did make it out despite her age and significant underlying medical conditions including periodic asthma. The 81-year-old retired science teacher from Hamden contracted CO

VID-19 around Thanksgiving — due to a workman in the house, she believes, not family. Her husband tested positive before she did.

Barbara Beitch, feeling sick, tested her blood oxygen level at home, saw it was low and went to the Yale New Haven Hospital emergency room. Three days later she was discharged, on Dec. 10.

“I’m a really energetic, multitasking person,” Beitch, a docent at the Peabody Museum, among other pursuits, told me this week, as was clear from our conversation. “And I’m not myself yet.”

May she, and all of us, regain full strength in the new year.