Yale: ‘Turnaround’ in COVID hospitalizations
Experts say Connecticut has seen a “turnaround” in COVID-related hospital admissions, though the state is not completely out of the woods.
“We have seen a turnaround here in Connecticut,” said Dr. Thomas Balcezak, Yale New Haven Health’s chief clinical officer, during a Monday press conference.
At one of the state’s largest health systems, there were only 142 patients in Yale New Haven Health hospitals as of Monday morning.
Of those, 78 are at the flagship hospital in New Haven, 46 are in Bridgeport Hospital, 12 are at Greenwich Hospital, 13 are at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London and there was a single hospitalized COVID patient at Westerly Hospital in Rhode Island.
“We are starting to see our COVID cases decline,” said Yale New Haven Health CEO Marna Borgstrom. “There’s a tendency on many people’s parts to say are we actually coming out of this.”
Borgstom and Balcezak credited the declining COVID hospitalizations to the state’s vaccination efforts, particularly among older residents. Balcezak said, “It’s exciting that about 54 percent of individuals in the state of Connecticut have gotten at least one dose ... and 38 percent are fully vaccinated.”
He said the patients hospitalized with COVID are “almost entirely unvaccinated individuals.”
Balcezak said YNHH is seeing “fewer elderly people admitted and fewer elderly people dying.” But while case numbers are down, he said, “we remain incredibly busy still. Our hospitals are full. Our Emergency Departments are quite active. And one of the things that’s driving that is, not that there are more patients but they are accessing services oftentimes later in the course of their disease, therefore they are sicker, have longer lengths of stay and are requiring more acute services for longer periods of time and we think that is something that is going to continue and persist for some time.”
He said the death rate has remained about the same. “The difference that we’ve seen is not necessarily the survival or death rate,” Balcezak said. “We have been pretty consistent in the high 90s in terms of discharge,” with about 1,200 deaths among 12,000 people discharged.
“Early on in the pandemic we saw a [survival] rate of ... 89 to 90 percent ... and that survival has gotten better to the point now, in the last nine months particularly, we’ve routinely discharged alive 95 percent of the people admitted to the hospital,” Balcezak said.
“But what has changed is the vaccination of the elderly groups first is we’ve seen fewer elderly people admitted and fewer elderly people dying. So our mortality rate has fallen among the elderly group especially,” Balcezak said. “And now as we’re penetrating with the vaccine 50 and above, that is starting to fall. So our total number of deaths now is going very far down,” from nine to six to one in the last three weeks.
But vaccine appointments are now going unfilled, due primarily to hesitancy, Balcezak said. He said while the mass vaccination sites will remain open, “we’re going to consolidate days . ... We need to have those facilities to give access to those local populations. For right now, we’re going to keep the majority of those sites open.”
“Last week we only administered 25,000 doses,” he said, down from a peak of more than 46,000 per week. “A lot of that was due to the fact that there was some hesitancy,” he said.
Balcezak said the health system has seen about 12 cases of people contracting COVID after getting vaccinated, the so-called breakthrough cases. He said none of those people has died.
YNHH, along with other vaccine providers in the state, has shifted away from appointments in favor of walk-ins, and Balcezak said they have been going well.
“We’re doing hundreds of those walk-up vaccine doses per week,” he said.
Likening the virus to a forest fire, Balcezak the more people who get vaccinated, the less opportunity the virus will spread in Connecticut.
“We can get some benefit in a fire by merely thinning out the fuel,” he said.