Expert: Not past delta wave yet
Warning comes even as data shows drop in positivity rate
Connecticut’s COVID positivity rate dropped during the three-day holiday weekend, marking one of the lowest numbers recorded in a month, the latest figures show.
Of the 61,032 tests administered over the weekend, 1,612 were confirmed cases for a positivity rate of 2.6 percent, according to Gov. Ned Lamont’s office. Hospitalizations also dropped by a net of two patients for a total of 363 statewide.
The daily positivity rate and hospitalizations, both key metrics reported daily by the governor’s office, have remained relatively stable through the past two weeks after a surge of delta variant infections caused cases to rise since June.
Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who appeared several times alongside Lamont in weekly COVID-19 briefings, told CNBC this weekend there’s a misconception that the Northeast is past the wave of delta variant infections.
“I don’t think that was the true delta wave, I think that was a delta warning,” Gottlieb said in the interview with CNBC. “I think our true delta wave is going to build after Labor Day in the Northeast . .... This is going to be a highly regionalized pandemic.”
He said along with Labor Day, the return to school may influence a wave of infections from the delta variant.
Many schools have reopened in the last few weeks and some have already reported cases among their students.
The first weekly reports on COVID cases in public and private K-12 schools, released last Thursday, showed 58 total cases among staff members and 247 cases among students.
Dozens of schools, according to the recent data, had reported fewer than six COVID cases.
The heightened level of COVID-19 infections comes as the delta variant continues to spread across Connecticut.
The latest genomic surveillance report from the Yale School of Public Health, issued last week, showed that the delta variant was responsible for 99 percent of all cases that were recently sequenced.
Last week, the World Health Organization gave a Greek designation to the B.1.621, which was first found in Colombia earlier this year. The report from the Yale School of Public Health said this variant, now called mu, was found in 73 recent cases, less than 1 percent of those sequenced.
Nathan Grubaugh, who leads the genomic surveillance efforts at the Yale School of Public Health, said the mu variant has several mutations. One of the mutations relates to viral transmission and the other relates to escaping the body’s immune system.
However, Grubaugh said they have been monitoring the variant closely for months in Connecticut, and its prevalence is down.
He said via social media: “the period of concern for Mu in Connecticut — and many other places in the US — is over. It was able to compete with with Alpha & Gamma, but it was no match for Delta.”
When the WHO gave the variant a Greek letter designation, it listed it as a variant of interest. The other more prevalent strains, including delta and alpha, are considered variants of concern.
Given the increased prevalence of variants like delta, community transmission in Connecticut remains high in six of the eight counties, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fairfield and Middlesex counties were the only two below the threshold for high transmission.