Lamont Peppered With Reopening Questions, Here's His Answers

CONNECTICUT — Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration provided some answers to a wide variety of reopening questions Thursday, but some specific points still need to be addressed.

The state reported 609 new lab-confirmed coronavirus cases out of 6,619 tests, which puts the state below a 10 percent positive case rate again. There have been a total of 35,464 lab-confirmed cases.

At the same time death numbers had increased with 94 new reports to a total of 3,219 deaths. Connecticut had 84 deaths reported Wednesday and 33 reported Tuesday.

Net coronavirus hospitalizations dropped by 55 patients, which makes for about three weeks of declines. There were 1,103 people hospitalized as of Tuesday afternoon.

Contact Tracing and testing

A single contact tracer can handle between 10 and 12 clients today. As of Thursday the state has more than 300 tracers, which gives capacity for more than 3,000 clients per day.

Lamont’s top administration officials are confident that the state will be able to perform at least 42,000 tests per week by May 20. With locked in contracts the state should have capacity for 70,000 tests by May 20, said state COO Josh Geballe.

Lamont has also gotten personal assurances from officials in the testing equipment supply chain that they will be able to provide adequate numbers of swabs and other items to meet Connecticut’s testing goals.

The biggest risk of virus transmission is within six feet of an infected person and a contact time of at least 10 or 15 minutes, said Dr. Albert Ko, who is co-chair of the state's reopening committee. In terms of contact tracing not every person that comes into short or distant contact with an infected person is at high risk of catching the virus.

Restaurants

Lamont again expressed his hesitation at allowing limited-capacity indoor dining at this point.
“My instinct is that it’s early and I want to see a little more experience with the outside dining first,” he said.

Many outbreaks known about are linked to indoor confined places, said Ko, chair of epidemiology and medicine at Yale University.

“When you are outside you have hundreds of liters of air exchange coming through the risk is really quite mitigated,” Ko said.

As for city restaurants Lamont said he has been impressed with what some cities are doing in terms of closing down some roads to vehicle traffic in order to have more outside dining area and pedestrian food traffic.

Playgrounds

Municipalities will have the final decision on how playground spaces can open up, but the state is providing guidance, Lamont said.

The state is making decisions when it comes to state-owned parks and playgrounds, said Lamont Chief of Staff Paul Mounds.

Frequent cleaning of high-touch surfaces in playgrounds like slides and swings will be imperative when they reopen, Ko said.

Casinos

Lamont’s administration has been working closely with the two tribes, he said. He is particularly concerned about casinos opening because it's a big indoor gathering place that attracts people from across the region, particularly the elderly who are more susceptible to the virus’ worst effects.

Connecticut is working with regional partners to discuss regional casino reopening plans.

Lamont said potentially allowing online gambling is going to take more discussion and that he doesn’t want the issue to end up in endless litigation.

“Now is a good time to have that conversation,” Lamont said.

Lamont also said his administration will work on outreach in southeastern Connecticut where much of the economy revolves around Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos, particularly for vendors who primarily serve the casinos and can qualify for a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan.

See also: Numerous Connecticut Lawmakers Want Lamont To Delay Reopening

Outdoor Dining Poses Challenges For Some Restaurants In CT

Unemployment issues

Lamont said well over 95 percent of submitted unemployment claims have been processed. Those that remain tend to have errors in the original submission that typically take a telephone call to fix.

Lamont was told as the news conference by a reporter that some people haven’t gotten any benefits in two months and said some people say they are on hold with the Department of Labor for six hours at which point the line closes for the day.

Lamont said he knows from his experience in the cable television industry that telephone systems can be a mess when many calls come in at once.

“Still that’s no excuse, we need to do better,” he said.

County by county opening? Probably not.

For now Lamont is still leaning toward a statewide reopening process instead of a county-by-county reopening. New York State started making county decisions, but Lamont said it's a six-hour drive to Lake Eerie from some parts of New York while someone in New Haven can get to almost any other part of the state within an hour.

However, he didn’t rule out taking a county-by-county approach down the line if it could be done safely.