State’s positivity rate reaches 24.5%; omicron peak still unknown
COVID infections from the omicron variant have surged beyond previous records set during the pandemic, bewildering prognosticators who say the exponential growth in cases has created uncertainty about when the surge will reach its peak.
Still, those experts have also been able to analyze the variant’s spread through earlier hotspots in South Africa and the United Kingdom — where initial reports indicate the omicron strain is more virulent, but with mil
der illness — to predict when numbers in Connecticut may begin to fall.
On Friday, Connecticut’s daily COVID positivity rate reached a new high of 24.5 percent, while hospitalizations continued to inch closer to a pandemic record.
Pedro Mendes, director of UConn Health’s Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling, said Friday that his models have faced greater uncertainty recently with each day’s addition of unprecedented infection rates.
“This happened in all previous waves where it has been hard to predict exactly when they peak until we are very close to it,” Mendes said.
Still, he said the data shows the wave peaking around the third week of January, with total hospitalizations surpassing the previous high of 1,972 patients set during the first wave of the pandemic in April 2020.
“We would be back to very low numbers of hospitalizations by March,” Mendes said. “After that, I cannot predict anything as it will mostly depend on whether new variants appear.”
On Friday, the state Department of Public Health reported another 10,076 cases, as nearly one-in-four tests returned positive results, topping yet again the previous record set earlier this week.
There were 1,810 patients hospitalized with the virus on Friday, an increase of 26 from the previous day. Of those patients, 32.7 percent were fully vaccinated, though there was a less-than 1 percentage point increase in vaccinated patients Friday.
The vast majority of patients — more than twothirds — remained unvaccinated.
The magnitude of the latest wave of infections and its timing around the holidays has strained hospitals and their staffs, created a rush on limited testing supplies and led many to wonder when the surge will begin to reach its peak.
The difficulty in predicting the future of the pandemic, however, is exemplified in how the current wave has surged past forecasts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading the federal agency to suspend publication of its forecast summaries for future cases.
The CDC has continued to publish both national and state-by-state forecasts for deaths and hospitalizations. The agency’s models for Connecticut show hospitalizations beginning to fall by the end of January, while new deaths continue to rise at a steady rate into February.
Dr. Ulysses Wu, the chief epidemiologist at Hartford Healthcare, said Thursday that factors in earlier waves of the pandemic — such as an increase in socializing around holidays — continued to point to a peak around the middle of January.
“Hopefully, people are not cohorting as much indoors, and that’s why we've always picked the middle of January,” Wu said. “The big thing is omicron — how deadly is it? How much are people going to be showing up in hospitals?”
The good news, experts say, is the wave of omicron infections appears to have crested in other countries, like the United Kingdom, that experienced a similar surge in cases in December and January.
However, as different areas of the country peak at various times, experts warned the worst effects of the wave have likely not yet been felt.
Jeffrey Shaman, a professor of public health at Columbia University who specializes in infectious disease modeling, wrote recently in the New York Times that the worst week of the current wave could see as many as 8 million infections reported nationally.