Gov fears ‘umbrellas in a hurricane’

Friday stood as a crossroads for the coronavirus crisis in Connecticut for reasons way beyond the 100,000 COVID-19 case marker, the headline number as I talked with Gov. Ned Lamont about where we’ve been and where we’re heading.

The illness will get worse, maybe much worse, before the numbers drop back down. That’s all the more true as we enter the indoor party season, the shopping season, the food-sharing season; as the huge spread in Midwestern states blows our way.

Yet, on this same day, Pfizer filed for federal emergency certification for a vaccine developed partly in Connecticut. And we seem to know more about how to keep people with COVID alive.

“There is a light at the end of the tunnel,” Lamont said in a 2 p.m. phone conversation, right around the moment when the numbers of confirmed and suspected cases since March pushed over that 100,000 morose milestone.

“I think the state has done pretty well,” he said. But he added, “I worry that we’re putting up an awful lot of umbrellas and there may be a hurricane coming.”

So Lamont, whose popularity has soared from the bottom to near the top of governor polls, looks back on the last eight-plus months, these 100,000 Connecticut infections, with a sense he’s done about as much as he could — but needs to do more.

He’s “absolutely” prepared to shut down stores, for example, if crowds starting on Black Friday led to infections.

“The 100,000 is a tragic number, but it also reflects the fact that the people of Connecticut are doing the right thing,” he said, citing tests, quarantines, high rates of maskwearing and mostly sacrifices by front-line workers.

“A lot of them are barely making $14 an hour and they’re showing up in that day care center, they’re showing up in Stop & Shop,” he said “These are nurses who every day walk right into the ICU wearing the gear and take care of people they’ve never met before ... Even politically I think it put some of our partisan edge aside. I think Connecticut has really rallied to the cause,” he said.

“And that makes me an optimist in the middle of a very pessimistic world.”

Not that he doesn’t worry. What will that hurricane look like? Could we have done more to avoid it? When will it end?

And what is Lamont prepared to

do to get us there?

He has traveled a middle path since that first Connecticut case on Saturday, March 7. That will continue. On Friday, he issued a stern warning as stores ramp up for what, in a normal year, would be a crush of shoppers.

“If I saw infection pick up related to stores, they wouldn’t be open. I’m prepared to do that if I have to, absolutely,” Lamont declared, a day after giving the Connecticut Retail Merchants Association the same ultimatum.

Lamont’s optimism comes through over and over, from retail to restaurants to the politics of wrangling money out of Washington, D.C., and the state’s stricken budget.

“I believe that retail can operate safely even in a 6 percent infection state. But it only does it if everybody maintains the protocols. I’ve heard about crowding in some of our department stores, I’ve heard about crowding in some of the common areas in a mall, and I’ve heard that some rare stores are casual about the mask. And don’t tell me it’s just a few bad apples. I need your help as an industry,” he said to me, reflecting his comments on Thursday, “making sure those few bad apples don’t ruin it for everybody.”

Optimism in the moment is fine. But looking back, we have seen just over 3,000 deaths in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, almost all of them in the springtime surge. That has accounted for nearly threefourths of the state’s 4,828 deaths.

An independent report cited problems with the way nursing homes, and the state, managed the crisis — including allowing a faster spread due to not enough tests, not enough protective gear and a policy that allowed staff to travel from one home to another.

I pressed him on that last point, noting that historian Bill Hosley cites a 1777 document in which nurses in a smallpox epidemic were limited to treating patients in one house each.

“If I had the nurses and I could have had them stick to…just their nursing home, would I have done that? Absolutely,” Lamont said. Did I have an opportunity to do that then?”

And he added, we simply didn’t have the testing capacity in April, nor the equipment. “But six months later, we’re trying to get additional nurses to the table,” he added. “I need everybody pitching in.”

That’s been the tone of Lamont’s televised briefings, now two or three times a week, originally every day.

He’s grown comfortable at the table in the makeshift state Capitol studio — and at home in Greenwich these last few days, in quarantine because chief spokesman Max Reiss contracted COVID. So much so, that I asked whether he’s watching his ratings, and whether he’ll want a TV show when he leaves office in 2026.

“Are you crazy? No, not at all,” Lamont said, adding that he prefers talking with state residents directly to “just 187 people in the legislature.”

Notice, I said 2026, which would imply he’s looking to run for a second term in two years. Lamont hasn’t said what he’ll do — he would face a tough test from strong Republicans arguing taxes and economics — but he’s looking more like a candidate these last few weeks and for the record, he didn’t correct me.

Looking ahead, his optimism is tempered by the sense, or the knowledge, that the worst of this pandemic — other than in the nursing homes — is coming between now and the predicted peak in January.

The number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 has climbed dramatically from a low of 42 in August to 848 on Friday. Per million residents, that’s more than the nation, which had been far worse than Connecticut.

We’re now seeing more than 2,000 people a day come down with COVID-19 and the percent of positive tests has climbed dangerously past 6 percent. All of this, including deaths, will get way worse according to Dr. Albert Ko, the Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist and co-chair of Lamont’s reopening committee, who spoke with me Friday about the numbers.

“If we don’t jump on this right now, we will have a very bad December and January,” Ko said late Friday. As for Black Friday and the holiday season, he added, “that’s a setup for continued transmission as we’re seeing right now in cases just going up exponentially.”

Look for more comments from Ko in the next couple of days. He, like Lamont, is satisfied the state has done well so far. “We reopened slowly so that we didn’t have a resurgence soon afterward, which was the case in Georgia, in Florida, Texas and many other parts of the United States.”

Still, Ko and Lamont know that hurricane is on its way.

Lamont said he isn’t terribly concerned about hospitals reaching capacity — “we can build a field hospital, we can dial back on elective surgeries,” he said — but he does worry about the wearing down of people’s willpower.

“Fatigue, just COVID fatigue,” he said.

And this: “Nurses and doctors getting stretched too thin and not enough people to back them up. Young people who say, oh, enough already, and they party, which is what I would have done when I was 18, I’m afraid.”

Lamont has people such as Scott Dolch of the Connecticut Restaurant Association pushing for more leeway, and people such as New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker pushing for a tighter shutdown. No, he said, it was not a mistake to reopen to Phase 3 in early October, only to pull back when the numbers went up.

And yes, he’s confident we can keep schools open.

“I think people understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. They don’t always agree, but they understand why we’re doing it,” he said. “It’s worked so far. My question is, will it work given the scale of what is hitting us now?”

He returns to his role as a calm presence. “I try to convince people every day that there is a light at the end of this tunnel.”