Case Prevalence Per 10,000, By Town
For the week ending Jan. 6, 2021
Like clockwork, two weeks after a holiday our COVID-19 numbers have shot up once again. We didn’t learn anything from the last time, and all the times before that, all the way back to Memorial Day weekend. The only good news is that there isn’t another big holiday happening for a couple of months.
Case numbers and case prevalence, which is the number of cases per 10,000 people, both jumped this week. During the week ending December 30, 2020, there were 12,958 new cases of COVID-19 reported; that number increased to 15,791 for the week ending January 6, 2021. Case prevalence increased from 36.27 cases per 10,000 people to 44.20 cases per 10,000 people. The test positivity rate increased from 6.18% to 6.85%, but there were also about 20,000 more tests administered.
This post-holiday surge is not quite as bad at the one we saw after Thanksgiving—at least, not yet. During the week ending December 16, there were 17,233 new cases, and the case prevalence was 48.24. There is still a definite possibility that this surge is not over, however, as the New Year’s holiday was only a week ago. We could easily see current numbers jump again next week before beginning to fall again.
Looking at the map, we can see huge swaths of the state with case prevalences of 40 cases per 10,000 people or more. That includes most of the eastern third of the state, and an unbroken line of towns from Stratford up I-95 through New Haven, then up I-91 through the Hartford area and up to Enfield and Suffield on the Massachusetts border.
The town of Canaan once again managed to have zero cases, but no other town had a case prevalence under 5 new cases per 10,000 people. Two eastern Connecticut towns had a case prevalence of over 100: Putnam had a state-high 134.11 new cases per 10,000 people, while Bozrah had 114.31.
As I’m writing this, COVID-19 has been overshadowed by a mob of insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol. What this means for the country is frighteningly uncertain, but it’s even clearer that we can expect very little in the way of federal leadership on the pandemic until after January 20th. Once again, we are on our own.
Vaccinations are proceeding, at least, and hopefully by the end of this month our frontline health care workers and others in the 1a group will be safe.
Better days will come. We just have to hang on.
Here’s last week’s map for comparison.
Case Prevalence Per 10,000, By Town
For the week ending Dec. 23, 2020
Susan Bigelow is an award-winning columnist and the founder of CTLocalPolitics. She lives in Enfield with her wife and their cats.
The views, opinions, positions, or strategies expressed by the author are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of CTNewsJunkie.com.
