Officials: Most hospitalized COVID patients in state haven’t been boosted

The “vast majority” of vaccinated patients with COVID infections in Connecticut hospitals have not been boosted, health officials say.

Hartford HealthCare said Thursday there were 466 COVID patients in its entire health system, a number which exceeds the 2020 peak. But of those patients, only seven have had boosters.

Of those seven patients, only two had received a third vaccine dose more than two weeks before getting admitted.

“We continue to see even more efficacy with individuals having boosters,” said Keith Grant, HHC’s senior system director for infection prevention.

The percentage of vaccinated COVID patients in Connecticut hospitals has increased dramatically since the omicron variant began spreading across the state.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines someone as being “fully vaccinated” after at least two weeks have elapsed since they received two doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“Remember, the CDC definition for ‘boosted’ is different from the clinical definition of ‘boosted,’” said Hartford HealthCare’s chief epidemiologist Dr. Ulysses Wu. “The clinical definition of ‘boosted’ does include a booster within the last two to four weeks. The CDC considers ‘fully vaccinated’ as still having completed the primary series irregardless of the booster.”

By the CDC’s definition, 78.3 percent of all COVID patients in Connecticut on Dec. 2 were not fully vaccinated.

On Jan. 6, that percentage had dropped to 68 percent, according to state data.

On Thursday, the state reported that 1,784 patients are hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19. Of those, 1,213 are not fully vaccinated, the data showed.

“The vast majority of those are unboosted,” said Scott Roberts, associate director for infection prevention at Yale New Haven Hospital. “The vaccine efficacy, even with boosting, doesn't hit 100 percent.”

Patients who have had a third vaccine dose sometimes get admitted, Roberts said, “but almost all those patients are not having severe enough COVID to be on a ventilator or dying from COVID.”

“If they do get admitted, they'll need a very tiny amount of oxygen or just monitoring,” Roberts said.

Though the number of younger people in hospitals with a COVID infection has increased — vaccine providers Thursday began administering third shots to patients 12 to 15 years old — Grant said the majority of vaccinated COVID patients are 60 and older.

As of Wednesday, 1,070,760 additional vaccine doses — counting both third doses for immunocompromised patients and boosters — have been administered in Connecticut, according to CDC data.

The majority of those, all but 10,152, have been administered to patients 18 and older, which may account for the increased number of pediatric patients, Roberts said.

“My guess is that a lot of that is reflecting the burden of COVID in the community in an unvaccinated population,” Roberts said. He said many of those patients who are both boosted and require hospitalization are immunocompromised.

“There are subsets of patients, definitely the vast minority, who are boosted but come in for COVID,” he said. “The only time we see that is when there's a reason for it. Somebody who's had an organ transplant recently and is on immunosuppressive medications and can't mount an appropriate immune response to a vaccine.”

Even though vaccinated patients are being admitted in greater numbers, Grant said Thursday the majority

of those do not need to be in intensive care units.

“The breakdown gets more interesting when you look at critical care,” he said. “We have a very small percentage, I think 3 percent of our patients that are COVID positive in critical care that are vaccinated as well.”

There’s “a subset” of patients, Roberts said, “found to be COVID positive on admission without clear symptoms suggestive of COVID. They broke their arm and they're coming in, and they're found to be COVID positive, but they don't have symptoms.”

That, he said, represents how infectious the omicron variant is. Essentially, there are so many people testing positive for COVID that it’s bound to cause an increase in hospitalizations.

“When you have state records being set every day, even a tiny bump in people who do need hospitalizations for COVID, impacts our health care system,” Roberts said. “So we're seeing our hospitalizations increase by the day.”