New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Doctor: COVID could rise again in cold weather
While Connecticut appears to be on back side of delta-driven coronavirus surge, public health experts are slow to make predictions about what the next stage of the pandemic will look like.
The state Department of Health, similarly, has not issued any forecasts as we approach our second pandemic winter.
Dr. Thomas Balcezak, chief clinical officer for the Yale New Haven Health system, said it’s hard to speculate what comes next, but he’s observed that cases at Yale have generally followed a two-month cycle. If that pattern continues, the system will likely see cases decline for the next six weeks or so.
“We’ll get down possibly to single digits again like we saw a month or two
ago and then we’ll start climbing up again,” Balcezak said at Tuesday’s regular briefing by Yale New Haven Health. “What we’re going to see for the foreseeable future is between three and five patients, up to a peak of 40 to 50.”
Public health experts have warned that the approaching colder months, when people will be gathered indoors where the chances of transmission are higher, could lead to another rise in cases. Though this time around, there are vaccines that have proven highly effective in preventing severe illness and death from the virus.
Yale on Tuesday reported a 45 percent decrease in COVID-19 patients over the past two weeks, while state numbers showed a 19 percent decline in the number of people in hospitals with the illness during that same period.
These are signs that, as some public health officials predicted, the summertime delta-driven coronavirus surge is coming to an end in Connecticut.
“It’s hard to say which way it’s going to go,” said Dr. Asha Shah, director of infectious diseases at Stamford Health, said of the trajectory of the pandemic in the coming months. “As of now, things have plateaued. Hospitaliztions are coming down, the percent positivty is coming down.”
For the most part, Connecticut residents are following public health measures like masking and social distancing, and a lot of businesses are requiring masks when indoors, all of which is helping to curb the spread of the virus here.
Still, “COVID is here to stay,” Shah said. “It’s going to continue to circulate to some extent in the community.”
The state on Tuesday reported 394 new daily COVID-19 cases out of 13,932 tests for a daily positivity rate of 2.83 percent. The weekly rate is at 2.9 percent, about even from a week earlier, down from earlier in the summer.
The state also reported 15 fewer coronavirus patients Tuesday from a day earlier for a total of 294 in Connecticut hospitals. The majority of the patients — 75 percent — are not fully inoculated, according to the state.
“We are going in the right direction — at least now,” Marna Borgstrom, president and CEO at Yale New Haven Health system, said Tuesday.
At Yale’s hospitals, twothirds of the patients are not vaccinated, Borgstrom said. Of the total 74 patients with COVID, 26 are in intensive care units and 22 are on ventilators.
“Clearly, people are still getting very sick,” she said.
While about a third of Yale’s patients are vaccinated, Balcezak said many of them are not hospitalized directly due to the virus. All patients are tested, so a vaccinated person hospitalized for a car accident, for example, who tests positive for COVID would be recorded as a breakthrough case.
Balcezak estimated the number of vaccinated patients hospitalized directly because of COVID to be closer to 10 percent.
The highly transmissible delta variant is leading to more breakthrough infections, but the cases tend to be mild or asymptomatic. Still, it shows why additional layers of protection — such as masking, particularly indoors — is important even for people who vaccinated, Balcezak said.
The least safe activity is for unmasked and unvaccinated people to gather in large crowds indoors, he said. But other decisions about indoor activities are less clear and come down to balancing decisions on individual risk.
“Why are you going there? Is this a funeral for a beloved friend or a concert for a band that you’re somewhat interested in?” Balcezak said. “You have to balance each one of those variables to come up with an individual risk because there is no guarantee here on anything.”