Expert: After COVID surge, keep guard up

DANBURY — The key to keep the city’s rise in coronavirus cases from surging through Connecticut a second time the way it did in March is not only the state-supported crackdown here on sports, in-person school, and group gatherings, an expert says.

In fact, the key to keeping the recent rise in Danbury’s COVID-19 cases contained and under control is not even so much in the advanced contact tracing and the increased free testing available here, a leading epidemiologist says.

Instead, the X-factor is how seriously everyday Danburians observe guidelines to wear masks, social

distance, and to stay at home as much as possible, the expert says.

“What we have learned is the amount of COVID in a community does appear to be dependent on how people in that community are behaving and working together,” says Dr. Rick Martinello, medical director for infection prevention at Yale New Haven Hospital. “What we’ve seen in places that have taken lockdowns seriously, where people are wearing masks and working hard to keep distances — with added testing — is that within weeks we typically see a turnaround in the number of cases.”

That means for Bridgeport and other cities in southwest Connecticut that have already sounded the alert about Danbury’s uptick in COVID-19 cases, the best strategy to keep the rise in cases from spreading is to stress to residents not to let their guard down.

“One guideline we don’t hear enough about is the need to minimize how much interaction we have in our communities,” said Martinello, who is also an associate professor of internal medicine, pediatrics, and infectious diseases at the Yale School of Medicine. “This is going to be even more difficult as schools reopen, because if we don’t keep our guard up, we could have a big outbreak in our community.”

Bridgeport’s top health official sounded the alarm on Saturday.

‘[W]e may see the influence of Danbury’s spike in our surrounding towns in the coming days,” said Bridgeport Health Director Lisa Morrissey, who left as Danbury’s health director in April for the same position in Bridgeport. “We must take this seriously now in order to mitigate a surge in Bridgeport.”

Concern about Danbury’s rise in cases in Fairfield, Hartford and New Haven counties follows the state declaring a COVID alert for the Hat City on Aug. 21. The concern here is not only a consecutive rise of one-dozen-to-several dozen new coronavirus cases each day, but Danbury’s high infection rate.

The infection rate measures how many people a single person with the coronavirus is likely to infect in a given community. Connecticut has maintained one of the lowest infection rates in the country at less than 1 percent, after putting the worst of the coronavirus crisis behind it.

In some cases, success stories can lull people into a false sense of security, said Dr. Michael Parry, chairman of infectious disease at Stamford Health.

“People have felt that Connecticut is in a good place and maybe they don’t need to be so rigid on wearing a mask and social distancing,” Parry told Hearst Connecticut Media last week.

Until recently, Danbury was part of that success story, going days at a time without a single case. But Danbury’s infection rate has recently been as high as 7 percent.

“I think our cases have plateaued, but our infection rate is still elevated at 5 or 6 percent, which is too high,” Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said Monday, noting that the city had seven new cases for the day. “We need to get that infection rate back down to one before we can reopen the schools.”

In response, with the state’s backing, Danbury has canceled youth sports, scaled back live church events, and moved all public school and college classes online. At the same time, in partnership with the state and with the city’s federally funded health centers, Danbury is offering free testing.

The good news is Danbury and the state have learned two important lessons over the last six months: How to find where the virus is spreading through contact tracing, and how to find where the virus is hiding by testing everyone, whether they have symptoms or not.

As many as one-third of people with the coronavirus have no symptoms, but are still capable of spreading it.

“We know now that by having a system in place it allows us to speak a lot smarter and a lot more comprehensively about what an individual uptick looks like,” said Max Reiss, Gov. Ned Lamont’s communications director. “What we were able to do in Danbury is deploy extra testing — we couldn’t do that six months ago.”

Boughton said 95 percent of Danburians are complying with the latest restrictions.

“Most of our people are being incredibly cooperative but some people are frustrated by having no more organized sports, or they think it’s a hoax,” Boughton said. “We have to spend time with them to say, ‘Look, the bottom line is we have more cases than yesterday.’”