Positivity rate falls
Connecticut’s weekly positivity rate and hospitalizations fell Tuesday.
Connecticut’s weekly positivity rate and its hospitalizations fell Tuesday, the second straight day of encouraging COVID-19 metrics.
In recent weeks, the state’s COVID-19 positivity rate and hospitalizations have fluctuated significantly. But on Monday, Connecticut reported its lowest single-day COVID-19 positivity rate since July. And on Tuesday, the state’s weekly positivity rate dipped under 3% and hospitalizations fell below 300 for the first time in five weeks.
It is hard to know how COVID19 metrics will change in coming weeks, health experts say, but they do have theories.
Dr. Ulysses Wu, an infectious disease specialist at Hartford Healthcare, said recently he believes COVID-19 numbers will decrease through the end of this month and begin to rise again around the end of October. Wu expects to see “our true surge” this winter, driven by cold weather and end-of-year holidays.
At Yale New Haven Health, chief clinical officer Dr. Thomas Balcezak said Tuesday that he has noticed a “two month undulation across the health system.” Balcezak noted that Yale New Haven Health has seen a 45% reduction in COVID-19 cases in the last two weeks, which he expects to continue for the next six weeks.
“Then we’ll start climbing up again,” he said.
In the United States and in countries across the world, COVID19 cases have largely followed a “mysterious” two-month cycle, the New York Times has reported.
Scientists still do not fully understand why the virus behaves in such cycles. One theory is that COVID-19 spreads in waves that follow a similar timeline; another is that it takes the virus about two months to make its way though a “typically sized cluster” of susceptible individuals and a new cycle begins when people break out of their normal networks, including for holidays.
Despite the two-month cycle that COVID-19 seems to follow, Balcezak said he does not expect to see a surge like the one that accelerated in March and April
of 2020, unless a new variant emerges that “completely evades the immune system.” But he added that the likelihood of that is extremely small.
“We’re going to see small undulations of case volumes,” he said.
Cases and positivity rate
Connecticut reported 394 COVID-19 cases out of 13,932 tests administered Tuesday, for a daily positivity rate of 2.83%. The state’s seven-day positivity rate now stands at 2.9%.
In the past three weeks, the state’s weekly positivity rate has ranged from a low of 2.71% on Sept.
13. to a high of 3.54% on Aug. 31.
All eight Connecticut counties currently have “high” rates of COVID-19 transmission, as defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hospitalizations
Connecticut reported 294 hospitalizations Tuesday, a decrease of 15 individuals since Monday. Hospitalizations have not dipped under 300 since Aug. 16.
Deaths
Connecticut reports coronavirus-linked deaths once a week, on Thursdays. Last week, the state reported 31 over the past
week, bringing its total during the pandemic to 8,447.
The United States has now recorded 677,261 COVID-19 deaths, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Vaccinations
As of Tuesday, 75.4% of all Connecticut residents and 86.5% of those 12 and older had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, while 67.9% of all residents and 78% of those 12 and older were fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.