Mayor provides COVID update
STAMFORD — After a quiet summer, it was business as usual on Tuesday evening for Mayor David Martin.
The mayor slipped back into a familiar format for his first COVID-19 livestream in three months, using a familiar cast of health experts to outline the highs and lows of the pandemic from his period of digital absence.
"I'm tired of this pandemic," he said. "I'm tired of getting out of my car and realizing that I forgot my mask and got to go back and get it again. I'm tired of putting on these information meetings. But we're gonna keep doing it because it's important to keep the community safe."
Flanked on screen by a team of health care advisers — including interim Health Director Jody Bishop-Pullan and Stamford Health's Dr. Henry Yoon — the mayor spent close to an hour outlining how the delta variant has changed the city's coronavirus landscape. He touched on everything from the local coronavirus infection rate to vaccination uptake, flitting between the current moment and what Stamford's outlook was during the late spring viral lows.
The city was reporting 17 new cases per day as of Sept. 26, according to a 14-day average of cases. And by that same metric, Stamford saw a daily caseload in the mid-20s during the delta variant surge in August. But the mayor was quick to remind his audience of how contained the virus once was in Stamford.
"We came down to a very, very low number," Martin said. "In fact, June 21 was our lowest number, with less than a half a case per day."
He's still chasing those extreme lows, especially since new daily cases have been steadily declining since Aug. 8, something Martin linked loosely to the mask and vaccination mandates he implemented when cases were rising sharply. Stamford currently requires indoor masking throughout the city and in some public spaces. It also orders all municipal employees to be vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing.
Though he stopped short of saying the mandates caused the decrease, Martin emphasized that cases had decreased 30 percent since he announced them.
"Overall though, since those mandates went into effect, we had a decrease, and we're showing a trend line down, which is very, very encouraging," the mayor said, adding that he would "reconsider some of (the) mandates" once the average number of cases per day reached about five.
Though the number of cases in Stamford jumped during the three months without regular updates, so did the overall vaccination rate. In every census tract, at least 80 percent of people older than 16 have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine as of Sept. 22. Across all Stamfordites, 77.1 percent of people have received at least one dose compared with 69.3 percent of Connecticut residents.
After expressing optimism over local vaccination uptake rates, Martin tempered the mood by passing the microphone to Director Bishop-Pullan, who briefed the virtual crowd on coronavirus protocols at Stamford Public Schools.
As of Sept. 24, the public schools have reported 124 confirmed COVID-19 cases among students and staff since the beginning of the school year; 34 people have tested positive in the past week. Since July, the number of positive cases among school-aged children in Stamford has climbed slightly and slowly, which Bishop-Pullan attributed to the lower vaccination rates among kids. However, the same increase has not manifested itself in the general population.
"We want to just make sure that we're monitoring this very carefully," she said.