The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
What do the 100,000 cases look like?
When we look at the 100,000 COVID-19 cases that have hit Connecticut since that first one on Saturday, March 7, the similarity to the 1918 flu epidemic comes alive.
It hit in the spring. Then it went away — sort of — and returned with cruelty in the fall. That October alone, nearly 6,000 Connecticut residents died, most of them in their young adult and middle years, not elderly.
This time, though, we hope and expect that the bulk of the deaths are behind us even as the raw numbers climb.
Connecticut hit 40,000 cases by Memorial Day, then hit the skids, thankfully, adding only 15,000 more positive tests by the middle of September. That’s when the numbers turned back upward.
By this week, we were averaging 2,000 a day. That’s partly because Connecticut is testing at a rate of 800,000 or more per month, compared with just a fraction of that as recently as the summer.
But we also know this: Hundreds of thousands of state residents, not just 100,000, have in all likelihood contracted COVID-19, most without knowing it. They either felt the humdrum symptoms of an overworked, rundown body, or, in as many as half of all cases, nothing at all.
Of the 100,000 cases we know about — confirmed through tests or suspected by doctors who heard from their patients — we can assume that tens of thousands would never have known they had the illness if not for their positive tests.
Looking at the breakdown, we know the race of 66,000 of the identified COVID-19 patients as of Thursday. Of those, white people accounted for 32,254 cases; Hispanic residents, 18,672; and from the Black community, 9,695. The upshot: Hispanic people have been 2.4 times more likely than whites to contract the illness, and Black residents, 1.9 times more likely than whites.
Nursing homes and assisted living facilities accounted for 71 percent of the 4,828 deaths so far, but only about one-eighth of the total cases. About half of all Connecticut nursing home residents have become ill with COVID.
By county, Fairfield remains ahead of the other state counties, with more than 33,500 cases, as New Haven and Hartford counties hold forth in a nearly dead heat, with about 25,200 each. No other county has more than 5,500.
And by age, people age 20 to 29, who had far fewer confirmed cases in the spring — most likely because of fewer tests — now represent 17,000 cases, more than any other age group. Unlike in 2018, however, few in that age group have died.