New Haven's pandemic voice of authority, Thomas Balcezak, and YNHH CEO Chris O'Connor at Tuesday briefing.
In a sign that vaccines are doing their job, the latest uptick in Covid-19 cases hasn’t landed more patients in intensive care or on ventilators.
So reported Yale New Haven Health System (YNHH) officials Tuesday afternoon at a Zoom briefing.
They reported that the number of Covid-19 patients at the system’s five Connecticut and Rhode Island hospitals stands at 86. That’s compared to 38 a month ago — and 767 on Jan. 11, at the Omicron surge’s peak. (The number of Covid-19 patients in Yale New Haven Hospital stands at 43.)
Even that modest uptick in cases has not nudged upward the number of patients in intensive care (nine, systemwide) or on ventilators (three), they said.
That’s because vaccines work, said YNHH Chief Medical Officer Tom Balcezak.
Even at times like the current uptick, “as our population becomes more highly vaccinated, those few people who develop disease that are vaccinated and are hospitalized, it is very rare that they need to be put in the ICU,” he said. Some people can still get breakthrough infections, he noted, but the cases become far milder because of vaccination.
Covid-19 remains a “pandemic” rather than an “endemic” because “unchecked spread” continues “across the entire globe,” Balcezak said. But we appear to be moving in that direction.
Gov. Ned Lamont announced Tuesday afternoon that the statewide official test-positivity rate has climbed to 9.9 percent. Meanwhile, the crew monitoring regional New Haven’s wastewater reported that the incidence of detected Covid-19 dropped last week after climbing to about 10 percent of where it had been at the Omicron peak.