Case Prevalence Per 10,000, By Town
For the week ending Jan. 27, 2021While a few key COVID-19 metrics declined this past week, both raw numbers of new cases and the number of cases per 10,000 people, or case prevalence, remained basically the same as last week.
Case numbers did decline ever so slightly, from 13,558 to 13,205, which also brought the statewide case prevalence down from 37.95 new cases per 10,000 people to 36.96. Compared with the massive shifts we’ve seen over the past month, this isn’t terribly significant movement.
What we’re seeing here is the same kind of stable case numbers that we saw for several weeks in a row back in November and again in December. In each of those cases, numbers were then pushed much higher by a holiday-related surge in cases. There is no holiday coming up to cause another surge, thankfully, but it does put us back into the same holding pattern we were in before.
It’s very possible that we’ll see several weeks in a row of these kinds of stable numbers. It’s certainly better to be in that kind of situation instead of another frightening surge of cases. However, my guess is that we’ll see case numbers begin to fall off due to the ramping up of vaccination efforts, which is something we didn’t have during the last periods like this.
Just the vaccination of healthcare workers and nursing home patients should begin to make a big difference.
Encouragingly, test positivity dropped from 5.25% for the week ending Jan.20 to 4.57% for this week. This is the first time in months that weekly test positivity has been under 5%. Hospitalizations also declined from 1,124 to 1,016, another welcome change.
As long as we can vaccinate enough people before the UK variant and other more-contagious strains of the virus take hold here, we should be okay. Gov. Ned Lamont reported that four new cases of the UK variant have been found in the state, bringing the total up to eight.
Let’s take a look at the map.
The clustering of cases we saw last week, especially in eastern Connecticut, has diffused somewhat. Case prevalence is still higher in the eastern third of the state, but there are fewer towns in that region with a case prevalence over 40. The northwest hills region is still doing better than anywhere else in the state, and has three towns, Warren, Cornwall, and Colebrook, that had zero new cases this past week.
Wethersfield (82.82 cases per 10,000 residents) and Hampton (86.35 cases per 10,000 residents) had the highest prevalence numbers in the state. No towns had a case prevalence of over 100.
Here’s last week’s map for comparison.
Case Prevalence Per 10,000, By Town
For the week ending Jan. 20, 2021Susan 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.
