HARTFORD, CT — For the first time in weeks hospitalizations jumped by a small amount on the sixth day of the first phase of Connecticut’s reopening.
According to the Department of Public Health, hospitalizations increased by five to 706. Hospitalizations has been a key metric for Gov. Ned Lamont as he monitors the COVID-19 pandemic in the state.
“As we are increasing the social contact rate, we are inevitably going to have transmission and that may translate into hospitalizations,” Dr. Albert Ko, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, said last week.
There may be some ups and some downs, but “we do have fail safe mechanisms,” Ko said. He said they go above the criteria the state feels is dangerous they can increase the social distancing that has been successful in lowering those numbers.
Josh Geballe, Lamont’s chief operating officer, said that they will detail exactly what benchmarks that would trigger another increase in social distancing this week.
Lamont did not hold a briefing on Monday and plans to release greater details of his reopening plan later this week.
“Just to preview that it’s really going to be focusing on that hospitalizations metric,” Geballe said last week.
He said if those hospitalizations really start to accelerate at the “100 or more benchmark” that may cause us to “push off a phase two.”
He said they increase hospitalizations by 200 in a week that will cause them to increase social distancing and rollback phase two.
The Department of Health data also showed that infections jumped by 405 to 40,873 and deaths jumped by 49 to 3,742.
The state noted that these newly reported updates include data that occurred over the last several days to a week. All data in this report is preliminary, and data for previous dates will be updated as new reports are received and data errors are corrected.