ANALYSIS | Connecticut’s Back On Right Track As School Opening Draws Near

Case Prevalence Per 10,000, By Town

For the week ending August 12

There’s definitely good news for nutmeggers sick of the constant threat of COVID-19 in this week’s prevalence map, which measures cases per 10,000 people in each town. A cluster of cases resulting from parties in eastern Connecticut is subsiding, and many towns all across the state are seeing lower numbers.

The few areas of the map in darker purple are either the result of a single case in a town with a very low population, such as Hampton, the result of prison testing in Montville, or, in the cases of Franklin and Voluntown, the lingering effect of parties that spread the virus in late July or proximity to Rhode Island. But even our eastern neighbor has managed to curb the spread of the virus, leading to its removal from the mandatory quarantine list.

Otherwise, we’re very much back to where we were in late June, before skyrocketing numbers in the rest of the country stalled Connecticut’s recovery. A majority of towns, 101, recorded less than 1 case per 10,000 people, and 79 out of 169 towns saw zero new cases this past week. There are no new outbreaks visible on the map, suggesting that masks, testing, and contact tracing continue to work well.

Opening the schools, then, seems like a safer bet than it did a few weeks ago. The horrifying experiences of schools across the country, such as the suburban Georgia county which had to quarantine over 1,100 students and teachers in the past two weeks, are not likely to be repeated here.

That doesn’t mean that schools will be entirely safe, however. The virus is still present, and as we’ve discovered over and over again, it will spread quickly if given a chance. Parents, teachers, and local officials still have a very hard decision to make as the school year approaches.

Even if schools do manage to reopen without causing another outbreak, we’re still a long way from getting back to normal. Until the rest of the country can contain the virus, normal is out of reach. But at least we’re heading in the right direction again.

Here is the August 5 map for comparison.