REFLECT. REBUILD.
Vaccinated Population How many people in each town have been vaccinated, by age group.
One year. That’s about how long COVID-19 has gripped the state and country, a period of indescribable loss, deep political divisions, remarkable resiliency and groundbreaking scientific discovery. From the time the first Connecticut resident died in mid-March — a man in his 80s who lived in a Ridgefield nursing home — the state has seen thousands of people die, businesses close and jobs lost.
But there is now reason for great hope. Vaccines developed in months by three manufacturers are being administered by the thousands each week, inching our world closer to normality. Today, about one year after the pandemic began, we take an in-depth look at all that is spurring our optimism, while we remember all we lost. The section will give you what you need to know about the vaccines, including where to get inoculated and more. We also reflect on the devastating toll, including publishing 6,510 names of those we lost. As we rebuild, we reflect on what we also lost, and move forward in their name.
That’s about how long COVID-19 has gripped the state and country, a period of indescribable loss, deep political divisions, remarkable resiliency and groundbreaking scientific discovery. From the time the first Connecticut resident died in mid-March — a man in his 80s who lived in a Ridgefield nursing home — the state has seen more than 7,000 people die, businesses close and jobs lost. But there is now reason for great hope. Vaccines developed in months by three manufacturers are being administered by the thousands each week, inching our world closer to normality. Today, about one year after the pandemic began, we take an in-depth look at all that is spurring our optimism, while we remember all we lost. The section will give you what you need to know about the vaccines, including where to get inoculated and more. We also reflect on the devastating toll, including publishing 6,510 names of those we lost. As we rebuild, we reflect on what we also lost, and move forward in their name.
Total Population
17.90% of residents have had at least 1 dose
ONLINE
For months several journalists and developers have continuously updated and improved our Connecticut COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker by sharing information on when residents are eligible to make appointments, granular data on vaccine distribution and important details on how vaccines work.
VACCINE TRACKER
Stay informed on the latest local and statewide updates as well as major regional, national and global information about the coronavirus vaccine.
greenwichtime.com/vaccinetracker
ANSWERING YOUR QUESTIONS
The race to vaccinate Connecticut's residents against COVID-19 is underway. See everything we know about the vaccines and the state’s distribution plan.
WATCH: Q&A WITH CT'S VACCINATION BOSS
Connecticut Public Health Commissioner Dr. Deidre Gifford joined Hearst Connecticut Media’s Dan Haar to answer your COVID vaccine questions.
She’s a medical doctor and she’s in the room for all the big COVID decisions in the state.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God I’m going to die alone in this hospital . ... I remember crying.” Christine Surel of Milford, on her five days last spring at Yale New Haven Hospital suffering from COVID
To begin to understand the knife-edge of life, the way we’ve changed in the last 12 months of coronavirus and the disorder that COVID-19 vaccines just might soften, let’s go back one year to see Christine Surel, a lifetime Milford resident and state employee who was then 53.
“I used to work out every single day and run a couple of miles five times a week,” Surel said this past Wednesday. She had no chronic medical conditions, ate “clean” food and most certainly didn’t fit the mold of a grandmother of two.
On Thursday, March 26, the last day her state Department of Children and Families office was open, she left early — sick. “By Saturday morning every system I had was failing.” she said, with a fever that spiked to 105 degrees.
Surel spent five days at Yale New Haven Hospital, where she thought she had a heart attack, was told she had pneumonia. “I was like, ‘Oh my God I’m going to die alone in this hospital . ... I remember crying.”
The illness didn’t go away. She has endured a hellish year, lost a lot of hair and memory function, and still suffers with fatigue, rashes, what she calls “brain fog,” on-and-off pain, tinitus and occasional panic attacks, like when she took a warm bath to relax — only to have it bring back memories of her fevers.
And yet it’s strangely uplifting to talk with this long-hauler, a sometime foster parent who, with her husband, has four adopted children ages 10 to 28. On Wednesday, she had her first workout since an ill-advised attempt in May.
“It just made me feel like I can beat this thing,” she declared, as she prepared to step out for trivia night at a local brewery. We talked about how her friendships and family life had changed.
“I definitely try to live more in the moment,” Surel said, “trying to spend more time with my kids just doing random things.”
‘Closer to my friends’
We’ve all pulled back on the number of people we see, mostly not by choice. It’s hard to know how the out-there aspects of our lives, in crowds and social situations, will shake out in the long run.
The vaccine, of course, will shape how we return to normal life. But even before the Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and other inoculations course their way through the global bloodstream, a lot of relationships — intimate, commercial and in-between — have changed in the one year since coronavirus hit the nation, hard in Connecticut in the early wave.
Surel’s experience made that rethinking more intense, but not necessarily more unusual.
“I definitely feel closer to my friends, even the friends that I don’t see that often,” she said. “The outpouring of support that I got when I was sick, I was like, ‘Wow, I really do have a great city and an incredible network of co-workers and friends.’”
‘Crisis unifies us’
On reflection, we see examples of that kind of rethinking all over the place.
At Amato’s Toy & Hobby on Main Street in Middletown, owner Diane Gervais didn’t relish the pandemic that kept her physically apart from most of her shopping families. But she, her daughter Caroline and their employees developed FaceTime shopping, “toy store takeout” and offered a lot of phone consultations.
“What last year oddly did was bring us even closer to customers,” Amato said.
I’ve heard that from a few doctors, too, who cite the dramatic rise in telehealth visits and, clearly, their role in a health crisis. “It did bring the patients closer to their doctors,” said Dr. Robert Russo, a Fairfield radiologist who’s executive director of the Connecticut State Medical Society.
“We usually move forward in the relationship between the patients and the physicians over time. I think COVID kind of bumped us, so that we flew forward,” he said.
State Rep. Caroline Simmons,
D-Stamford, sees it, for now at least, in politics at the General Assembly, where in-person sessions remain rare.
“In many ways the relationships between me and other legislators have been strengthened,” Simmons said. “People have kids running around in the background and dogs barking, we’re all sort of in this together.”
As co-chair of the Commerce Committee, Simmons cited bipartisan support for a bill to back businesses run by women and racial minority owners. “In the past I’ve gotten pushback on advocating for that,” she said.
“There seems to be not as much partisanship at least in Commerce and some of my other committees,” said Simmons, whose husband, Art Linares, was a Republican state senator when they married.
“Crisis unifies us in shared mission,” Simmons said, referring to public life, but she added, “I’m sure the politics will certainly come into play as we progress in the session.”
Chaos and dark humor
We’ve been talking about this whole shared-mission concept for a year now and it’s squishy but it also does seem real — along with the equally real friction over who gets the vaccinations and how much longer the travel, dining and events economy must remain shut down.
As with everything else in Coronavirusworld, the winding down of the pandemic as the vaccine reaches more people and as the virus runs its course is anything but predictable and orderly.
Gov. Ned Lamont’s top aides debated among themselves Wednesday and Thursday before announcing sweeping reopening plans. “It’s very difficult to make sense of what’s going on right now with the virus,” Lamont spokesman Max Reiss said.
All of this creates chaos and dark humor. Late night comic Stephen Colbert had fun with the reopening this past week, comparing the 100 percent business return in Texas to “removing all the stop signs from a four-way intersection,” then making fun of cautious public health officials. “Our scientists are starting to sound like parents on a long road trip.”
Stepping out of the fog
Out of the chaos, strife and for many, pain, come moments of uplift, determination, revelation.
Simmons has a 2-year-old toddler and a baby born last August, both of whom are growing up knowing only the postCOVID world. Teddy, the toddler, thinks of the mask as part of normal life. “He’s starting to say these words, like mask and COVID,” she said.
No, he hasn’t said “vaccine” yet.
Normalization is the opposite of what Christine Surel wants to see. She remembers heading to the hospital by ambulance. “We were like the only car on the highway,” she said, and with the crew in full hazmat suits, “I felt like ET.”
At the hospital, she was on oxygen but not a ventilator. They gave her the experimental drug remdisivir and other medications. She recalls little contact with the medical staff and long stretches of hopelessness.
Then one day a nurse approached her bed. “’I can’t tell you it’s gong to be all right but I’m here,’” she recalls him saying. “He put his hand on my wrist.”
Now almost a year later, the illness not gone, she’s grateful for that moment, grateful she survived, knowing a handful of people who didn’t.
“I’m doing everything I can to make the best of what COVID left me with,” Surel said. “It’s definitely gotten better. I know my Social Security number now.”
Like many grandparents, she said, “I didn’t see my grandchildren for almost six months and then I couldn’t take it anymore and said, ‘You’ve got to come over.’”
And this week, as the numbers led states to reopen, as normalcy finally appeared on the horizon, she took those strong steps out of the fog with a workout and a night out.
“I want to get back to living. I feel, like everyone else in the world, I’m tired of this.”
NEW HAVEN — For Dr. Albert Ko, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health and a lead adviser to Gov. Ned Lamont on COVID-19, the pandemic has offered lessons the nation would do well to learn.
Structural problems in American society, including a lack of support for public health, including the ability to track emerging diseases, and major inequities in health care that harm people of color, predated the coronavirus and helped to plunge the nation into a year with 500,000 deaths, he believes.
“It’s almost a kind of a sadness — it’s very hard to escape — about what this pandemic has told us in the big picture,” Ko said.
One good thing that could come out of the pandemic would be finally addressing those endemic problems, he said.
Ko, who led the Reopen Connecticut Committee last spring with Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi, put together a plan with Gov. Ned Lamont and his team that spared Connecticut much of the suffering of other states and the confusion experienced in rolling out vaccines.
“[Nooyi] ran it tightly and she made sure that all the attention to detail was done. That plan was really to her credit,” Ko said. “We did it carefully and she really, in her executive skills, was really key.”
While the U.S. has not handled the pandemic as well as others, such as South Korea and New Zealand, the experience hasn’t been all negative, Ko said. “There are a lot of success stories like the vaccines. … A vaccine in one year, it’s just tremendous,” he said. There also have been “success stories, the really heroic efforts” of health care workers. “We saw how countries like Italy in the first surge got overrun, completely overrun — 20, 30, 40 percent of health care workers getting infected,” he said.
Erosion in public health infrastructure
Ko said the pandemic showed “the disproportionate impact that this has had on the United States compared to other countries. … This really showed us decades of neglect in investment in public health.”
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “kind of the pride of the country,” Ko said, “there’s been an erosion. That didn’t happen just in the last administration. And there’s certainly factors within that administration that eroded the strength of our public health decision-making processes, but that erosion happened over decades.”
Ko also believes the U.S. has fallen behind in its use of scientific data and evidence in addressing public health issues. “We see other countries have now become kind of the paradigms, thinking about countries in Asia, about really not only the flexibility but the speed and the rapidness of using data to inform decisions,” he said.
Another longstanding issue is the inequity in health care, “the disproportionate impacts on communities of people of color,” Ko said.
“It’s not like that happened overnight, either. We have to ask ourselves why,” he said. “This is a disease that affects the elderly, that affects people with underlying medical conditions, and how can we allow ourselves to have large swaths of underserved communities and the people living in underserved communities with really poor states of health that place them at risk.” COVID is merely a symptom of a deeper problem, he said.
Ko believes we will not be able to eradicate COVID-19, largely because it is so highly contagious. “There’s some similarities, but there are also important differences between influenza and the coronavirus,” he said. “The first thing is that this disease is much more transmissible. A good example of that is that we have almost no influenza, right?” That’s been attributed to measures such as wearing masks and social distancing.
“And yet we’re having a lot of COVID. That tells you how difficult, how this is different from influenza,” he said. “Because of that transmissibility … my gut feeling is that we will never eradicate this disease. The best we can do is to control it.”
Another reason the disease will continue on is the resistance by some to take those steps to protect both themselves and others. “That’s going to take buy-in, citizenship, people thinking about others, just not themselves,” said Ko, who has long experience working in the poor cities of Brazil.
“We just did a survey of people in the poorest slums, urban communities in the city that I worked in. Eighty percent of people want to take the vaccine,” he said. “And the biggest motivating factor is because they want to protect their family and they want to protect their community. And that’s what we need to create, that kind of citizenship.”
What the state got right
Ko said he thought Connecticut, for the most part, had made the right decisions when it came to reopening after the shutdown in March.
“It’s easy, especially for us in academics, it’s easy to sit back and criticize and be the armchair epidemiologist,” he said. “There’s an obvious need to make decisions, based on evidence, and sciencedriven, and those have been almost kind of like cliches now. But in reality, decisions are made on judgment because we have lack of evidence. … In reopening the state, I think we got it right. We had low levels throughout the summer and going into the fall.”
Keeping bars closed and schools open were two important decisions that some states went the opposite way on, he said. “I think we have to be completely humble in what we know and what we don’t know, and we still don’t know exactly what the risk is in people going to school,” Ko said. “But based on where we’re at now, I think the state got it completely right in doing everything it can to keep the schools open. One, because of this issue of disproportionate impacts, the people who depend on schools and don’t have access to the learning.”
Ko also defended Lamont’s decision to open up vaccinations largely by age, in order to get people immunized in as efficient a way as possible. “In a mass vaccination campaign, or any mass public health prevention, we need to do it simply,” he said. “The more complicated … you make a lot of problems along the way. And I was always concerned about the CDC recommendations that came out.”
While some younger people with health issues will be behind healthy 50-year-olds, Ko said “it’s a question of speed and efficiency versus precision.”
“Generally, age is what we call a marker or proxy of health status,” he said. “So, certainly, there are going to be those people, but … that’s the balance between … getting it out quickly and … targeting it to people with the highest risk. There has to be a balance between those two and especially in a mass-vaccination program.”
Ko said Connecticut has done a good job of protecting nursing home residents, at least in the second wave.
“I remember I was at Yale New Haven Hospital. The first case was diagnosed March 13,” he said. “And it just spread like wildfire in not just Connecticut, but New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts. … And there’s not enough time to react. Lesson learned. Second wave, they got the testing in. There are still outbreaks in nursing homes, but much less than what we observed in the first wave.”
The speed with which the pandemic hit had everyone scrambling without the proper tools, Ko said. “We’ve got to take ourselves back. At that time, we didn’t have a diagnostic test. Remember that the CDC had dropped the ball on that. We were completely unprepared (in) the hospitals. … Marie Landry [director of the Yale School of Medicine’s Clinical Virology Laboratory] was the first one to come up with a clear, FDA-approved test outside of what the state was using.
“It had already spread throughout the nursing homes,” Ko said. “We didn’t have a test. We didn’t know who was infected, who wasn’t infected, who needed to get quarantined, who needed to get isolated. … We’re telling people not to come into the hospital unless you’re sick because we didn’t have any tests out there. So kind of bring ourselves back to that mindset. … Not to be kind or generous to the state, but it was a horrible situation. We were completely unprepared for it.”