6 February 2022: Connecticut Newspaper Reports COVID Nursing Home Numbers, Forgets to Ask Right Questions

Danbury area home COVID cases, deaths decline: ‘Nothing like we saw at the end of 2021’

This report from Danbury, Connecticut's NewsTimes puts a local spin on the latest COVID data from Connecticut's nursing homes. We've excerpted the following passages from the article:

Infections among residents across the state are decreasing after a mid-January peak, state data released last week show. In the past two weeks, case numbers stayed below 30 across all state facilities, with a 47 percent decline in total cases since the last report. Most facilities in the Danbury area are reporting no cases, or numbers in the single digits and low teens...

While COVID-related deaths are still higher than they were earlier this fall, these numbers are also starting to decline from a high point of 58 deaths reported on Jan. 20.

The 40 deaths recorded over the most recent two-week period included no more than one or two deaths per location, with the exception of Mystic Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Groton where five deaths were reported.

Prior to the Jan. 20 report, facilities were reporting 13 or fewer deaths during the biweekly state update.

The report makes no mention of the Lamont administration's 8 January 2022 guidance requesting nursing homes admit COVID-positive patients being discharged to free up hospital bed space. Instead, it picks up on a health care manager using hearsay to point their finger at visitors to nursing homes as a blameworthy source of coronvirus infections:

Dr. Vivian Leung, who works as the medical director for the DPH’s Healthcare-Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance Program, said this most recent wave saw infection numbers greater than last winter. But high rates of resident vaccination and boosters have meant that mortality rates are going down with each successive wave of the pandemic....

New cases can be hard to trace back to a specific source, but high viral loads in the community mean that visitors and staff might have unknowingly introduced the virus into some nursing home settings.

Leung said that the state worked hard to ensure residents were boosted before the holidays, but she did hear stories of visitors visiting without knowing they were infected.

“We knew that visitation was a potential source of infection, especially when there's such high rates of community transmission. People can come in, unknowingly infected, and really with the best of intentions of spending some time with their loved ones.”

We still haven't seen any reporting indicating how many COVID-positive patients might have been taken in at Connecticut's nursing homes under the Lamont administration's guidance. We hope that answer is zero, since unlike Andrew M. Cuomo's infamous deadly 25 March 2020 directive, Connecticut nursing homes haven't been forced to admit these patients. But without competent reporting or a proper investigation, how is anyone to know?