Nearly 2,000 CT Lives Could Have Been Saved With COVID Vaccines: Study

CONNECTICUT — Nearly 2,000 COVID-19 deaths in Connecticut — and about 319,000 nationally — could have been prevented after vaccines became widely available early last year, according to a new analysis by health researchers.

In Connecticut, some 1,962 of 4,751 COVID-19 deaths, or 691 deaths per 1 million people, could have been prevented with vaccine protection, according to the analysis published at Brown School of Public Health’s Global Epidemics website.

A dashboard showing a state-by-state breakdown of preventable COVID-19 deaths from January 2021 through last month was released earlier this month as a descendant of the omicron variant becomes the dominant strain of the virus.

Also contributing to the analysis were researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Microsoft AI for Health.

They say their analysis shows that since vaccines became widely available, every second COVID-19 death could have been prevented.

COVID-19 has killed more than 1 million people in the United States since the first deaths were reported in 2020. Daily reports of new COVID-19 infections have increased threefold since April, according to a database maintained by The New York Times, increasing in almost every U.S. state but especially in the Northeast and Midwest.

In those regions, The Times reported, case reports now are higher than they were in advance of last summer’s delta variant surge. However, with the availability of at-home tests whose results don’t show up in official counts, the number of people with COVID-19 infections may go undercounted.

On average, more than 300 people a day are dying, fewer than the average of 2,600 people who died daily at the height of the omicron surge, according to The Times.

The number of Connecticut residents hospitalized with COVID-19 has been climbing since mid-February, up to 348 as of Monday afternoon's report from the state Department of Public Health. The rolling 7-day positivity rate dropped over the weekend to 12.3 percent, down nearly two percentage points from Friday's data. As of Thursday, the virus had claimed 39 lives in the past week — 14 more than logged the week before — according to state health officials.

In Connecticut, about 83.9 percent of the population 5 years and older is fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker. If you haven’t gotten a vaccine or boosters, the CDC maintains a database of available sources throughout the state, and there's a Connecticut mobile clinic tracker online here.