Next vaccine phase nears
Those 75 and over up next week; positivity highest since spring
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont on Monday announced that the state will soon be shifting into the next phase of coronavirus vaccinations, and appointments for residents who are 75 and over will begin as early as next week.
Residents who are at least 75 and who do not live in nursing homes will be the first eligible group in Phase 1B. State officials said that hospitals and other health care providers will begin calling those residents on Thursday, with appointments beginning on Jan. 18.
At a Monday afternoon press briefing, Lamont emphasized that administering the vaccine to the next set of eligible residents will take time.
“There won’t be room for everybody on day one, so you’re going to have to be patient,” Lamont said. “It’s going to take a while. I can’t do everybody in that first week.”
Eligible residents should not call their physicians to schedule vaccination appointments, state officials said. Health care providers and hospitals on Thursday will begin reaching out to eligible residents directly. Alternately, residents will also be able to book appointments through an online or telephone system — the state plans to release more information on those systems on Thursday.
The vaccination news came
on the same day that the state hit its highest weekly positivity rate since the spring. And while officials continue to brace for a possible post-Christmas surge, health care providers across the state continue to vaccinate the nursing home residents, health care workers and medical first responders who are eligible under the ongoing Phase 1A. As of Monday, more than 140,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine have been administered in Connecticut, Lamont said.
And as the number of administered vaccine doses goes up, and Phase 1A winds down, the state is shifting its focus to the next phase.
Connecticut’s Phase 1B of vaccinations is set to include residents who are 75 and older, frontline essential workers and residents of congregate settings including group homes and prisons. (The state’s vaccine advisory group is still considering adding to that phase residents who are under the age of 75 and have co-morbid conditions such as cancer or diabetes.)
But not everyone in Phase 1B will be vaccinated at the same time. The state has decided that residents 75 and older will be next in line, before any of the other Phase 1B subgroups. Lamont said residents in congregate settings — even those who are 75 and older — will be vaccinated at the same time later.
Patrick Charmel, the president of Derby’s Griffin
Hospital, said that the hospital will seek out residents who are 75 and older by leveraging existing patient relationships and also working with local social services departments and community organizations such as churches.
“We’re pretty sure we’re going to get most of them just looking at our own information, but we’re not stopping there,” Charmel said.
State officials emphasized that the beginning of Phase 1B won’t be a free-for-all.
“It’s all appointment-based,” Geballe said. “You won’t get a vaccine if you just show up without an appointment.”
Lamont said on Monday that the state will soon open mass vaccination sites across the state, beginning with one at Rentschler Field, which the governor estimated would be set up in about 10 days.
“You’ll be able to go to Rentschler Field and you’ll be able to (a) with an appointment, get vaccinated, (b) get tested and (c) as needed, depending on need, be able to get some food support as well,” Lamont said.
Weekly positivity rate hits high
The announcement of the upcoming Phase 1B came as Connecticut continued to report a relatively high positivity rate.
The state on Monday reported that since Friday it had identified 7,364 new coronavirus cases out of a total of 116,244 tests administered — which yields a positivity rate of 6.3%. That several-day rate is lower than the state reported in late December.
But including the weekend’s numbers, Connecticut on Monday reached a weekly rate of just over 7%, which is the highest weekly rate the state has seen during the second wave of the pandemic.
Also on Monday, the state reported that hospitalizations had risen by 33 since Friday, for a total of 1,142 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Connecticut’s hospitalizations numbers fluctuate from one day to the next, but have remained below 1,200 for nearly two weeks.
Over the weekend, the state also saw 92 additional coronavirus-linked deaths. In total, since the pandemic began, Connecticut has seen 213,358 coronavirus cases and 6,416 coronavirus-linked deaths. So far this year, the state has seen 27,650 cases and 421 deaths.
Nationwide, since the pandemic began, there have been more than 22.5 million coronavirus cases and a total of 375,350 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.