Health aide disappears from virus briefings then is fired

Several weeks ago, Connecticut’s public health commissioner suddenly stopped appearing with Gov. Ned Lamont at his daily briefings on the state’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

This week, the governor fired the commissioner.

It was a highly unusual shake-up, given that the state has been one of the hardest hit by the crisis. But Lamont, a Democrat, had apparently soured on the commissioner, Renée D. Coleman-Mitchell, after a behind-the-scenes struggle over plans to protect residents of nursing homes during the outbreak.

Coleman-Mitchell had overseen a plan that called for segregating nursing home residents with the virus in long-term care facilities that would house only those who were infected.

But the plan was rejected because it was never vetted with other public health experts, including the state epidemiologist.

And it would have required transferring healthy residents out of nursing homes to make room for infected patients, alarming relatives who opposed having family members displaced.

Instead, Connecticut established recovery centers to isolate nursing home residents who had the virus and had been released from the hospital, a relatively novel approach that has drawn praise from public health specialists.

But the internal debate over how to protect nursing homes hamstrung the state as it tried to move quickly to find ways to contain the outbreak, officials and elected leaders said.

“Time was lost on that aborted initiative before we got on the better path,” said Martin M. Looney, the state

Senate president and a Democrat.

State lawmakers and administration officials said Coleman-Mitchell had clashed with other state officials over the response to the virus and been relegated to a back-seat role as the pandemic worsened.

Others defended Coleman-Mitchell, saying that she was being scapegoated for the state’s failures to safeguard nursing homes and noted that other states were facing similar challenges.

As of Thursday, the virus had killed 3,219 people in the state, including 1,927 nursing home residents, according to state officials.

Coleman-Mitchell, who was appointed to the post last year by Lamont, said she was told she was not being dismissed because of her job performance.

The governor declined to say specifically why he was replacing Coleman-Mitchell.

“I thought this was a good time to make a change,” Lamont told reporters. “I think the job has changed, and I want closer coordination with our different departments.”