New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Yale New Haven Health treating ‘staggeringly small’ number of COVID patients
The number of COVID patients being treated in the Yale New Haven Health system is “staggeringly small,” the hospital system’s top executive said Monday.
Across the entire health system, including all five hospitals, there are 64 total COVID patients, down from 142 two weeks ago.
“This kind of decline that we’ve seen has been absolutely remarkable,” Marna Borgstorm, the health system’s CEO, said during a Monday press conference. “We’ve had a significant reduction of COVID cases.”
Of those 64 patients, 26 are in intensive care units and 17 are on ventilators, “which means they are very sick patients,” Borgstrom said.
The bulk of the health system’s COVID patients, 43 of them, are being treated in New Haven. There are 14 COVID patients being treated at Bridgeport Hospital, four at Lawrence+Memorial Hospital in New London and three in Greenwich Hospital, which Borgstom said was particularly noteworthy.
“Virtually all of the patients at Greenwich Hospital were COVID patients last spring,” she said.
There are no COVID patients currently admitted to Westerly Hospital in Rhode Island, which is also run by Yale New Haven Health.
The health system has seen tens of thousands of COVID patients over the course of the pandemic, more than 13,000 since the first admission.
Of those, “11,700 have been safely discharged back home,” Borgstrom said, which means “we have lost 1,300 people since the pandemic started.”
Children age 12 and older became eligible to be vaccinated against COVID last week, and Yale New Haven Health’s Chief
Medical Officer Tom Balcezak said the health system had vaccinated close to 13,000 12- to 15-year-olds between Thursday and Sunday.
However, the demand has fallen off rapidly since then.
“We’ve seen a very steep drop off in demand,” he said. “We have only 2,000 folks scheduled within the next couple of days to come in.”
That ebb and flow, an initially high demand followed by a lull, has been seen every time a new age bracket becomes eligible, Balcezak said.
In December, when COVID vaccines were first made available in Connecticut,
the health system administered 14,013 doses. That grew to 39,413 doses in January, 58,583 doses in February, 94,549 doses in March and what Balcezak called “an astonishing” 139,914 in April.
Yale New Haven Health administered 45,595 COVID vaccine doses in May as of the 12th of the month, and “our pace of vaccination has slowed even since the 12th,” Balcezak said.
All told, Balcezak said the health system has, so far, “delivered almost 400,000 vaccines into people’s arms,” but that momentum has all but disappeared.
“In the last couple weeks demand has really evaporated,” he said.