‘It’s rough out there’
COVID and flu rates rising in Conn. as December begins
With flu rising “exponentially” and COVID once again increasing, Connecticut hospitals are bracing for a winter viral surge.
COVID rates and hospitalizations had plateaued in recent weeks, state Department of Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani said during a news conference this week, though she said “there’s still a lot of COVID that is circulating.”
State data released Thursday suggests COVID rates are no longer flat in Connecticut.
Children’s hospitals in the state have
already reached capacity due to RSV, a common respiratory virus that primarily impacts younger people. But Scott Roberts, Yale New Haven Hospital’s associate medical director for infection prevention, said RSV may have already peaked.
Flu rates, however, have been increasing “exponentially,” he said.
“Our lab reported a tripling in positive flu cases over the past week, and our hospitalizations, flu has now exceeded COVID,” he said. “This happened very suddenly, within a few weeks.”
Now, a week after Thanksgiving, as colder weather drives people inside, there are indications that COVID may be spiking and Roberts’ own family has been impacted. Since his son started school in September, Roberts said “We’ve gotten three or four respiratory viruses that just spread amongst the whole family.”
“This week, our nanny tested positive for COVID. My wife’s best friend tested positive for COVID, she got her whole family sick on Thanksgiving,” he said. “Yeah, it’s rough out there.”
Those anecdotal reports may be backed up by statewide data, Roberts said, suggesting a worrisome shift toward increased COVID rates and hospitalizations across Connecticut.
The state logged an increase over the past week of 68 patients hospitalized for COVID infections, according to data released by DPH, a total of 413 statewide. There was an increase of 15 deaths from COVID over the same time period, bringing the total to 11,587 since the virus first appeared in Connecticut.
“We’re starting to see some signal of COVID rising. That’s a bad trend that concerns me,” Roberts said. “I hope flu plateaus and starts coming down, but the rate of rise is very concerning and makes me really nervous for what the rest of December in January will bring.”
The last significant spike in COVID rates was in February, when there were 1,939 patients hospitalized with the virus in Connecticut. Two months earlier, on Dec. 1, 2021, there were 414 hospitalized COVID patients in the state. A month later, that number had more than tripled to 1,359.
Ulysses Wu, chief epidemiologist at Hartford HealthCare, said the reasons to expect a rise in COVID cases and hospitalizations are simple: “One, vaccination rates are fairly low at this point. Number two, the winter is obviously going to be forcing people indoors.”
“Number three is more of a sociological reason in the sense that COVID is just an afterthought and so the precautions are not necessarily being taken at this point. whether it be masking, whether it be gathering,” he said. “I think life is really back to full swing at this point.”
Both Wu and Roberts said hospitals could very well be overwhelmed as the winter wears on, but Wu said it should not be as significant a problem as it was at the start of the pandemic.
“I think we’re definitely going to see an increase but the question is how lethal this virus is now,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, people are still being hospitalized, people are still dying.
But this is all in perspective and relevance to the previous two years.”
More than capacity issues, Wu is concerned about the ability of hospitals to maintain the necessary staff levels as the viral season wears on.
“I think we’re going to get a lot of patients and I think we’re going to be strained,” he said. “Our biggest worry actually is health care workers getting sick, not necessarily the capacity.”
While 413 COVID patients in area hospitals may seem like a surprisingly high number, Wu said many of those patients may have been hospitalized for an unrelated issue and were found to have COVID after testing.
However, determining if an issue is in fact unrelated is not always straightforward. Wu said it was a “chicken and egg” situation.
“There have been some stroke patients that have come in and were found to be COVID positive and I would say that COVID certainly could be a part of that picture as well,” he said. “If you go back and look in the retrospective scope, one could argue it was really the COVID that made their medical condition happen in the first place.”