Death Toll Rises, Hospitalizations Drop + Latest Town-By-Town COVID-19 Case Updates

CONNECTICUT — You can run, but you can't hide, from the coronavirus omicron variant.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, said that, "Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody."

Fauci made his remarks in a "fireside chat" to the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Tuesday.

But there's a good-sized gap between omicron "finding" everybody and the variant putting the hurt on them to any great degree. Omicron has proven wildly transmissible, but seems to cause fewer deaths and hospitalizations per infection. In Connecticut, daily coronavirus-associated hospitalizations declined overnight for the first time since the fall (see below).

"Those who have been vaccinated ... and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death," Fauci said.

In the areas where omicron hit early, such as Connecticut and New York, the variant appears to be running out of hosts to infect. Although hospitalizations and deaths continue to climb — and the state is likely to soon surpass the April 2020 pandemic hospitalization high — the coronavirus foot is clearly off the gas in the Northeast.

That most people in the country would end up infected with COVID-19 regardless of their vaccination status is "hard to process," FDA acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock told a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee hearing Tuesday. She urged lawmakers to do what they could to ensure that hospitals, transportation and other essential services "are not disrupted" as the virus continues to spread.

Despite the effectiveness of the coronavirus vaccines and booster shots, breakthrough cases continue to creep upwards, and public health officials fear omicron's higher transmissibility make the unvaccinated even more vulnerable.

"Unfortunately, those who are still unvaccinated are going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this, and although it is less severe on a case by case basis, when you quantitatively have so many people who are infected, a fraction of them, even if it’s a small fraction, are going to get seriously ill and are going to die, and that’s the reason why it will challenge our health system," Fauci said.

One hundred and sixty-one residents have died from COVID-19 over the past seven days, up from last week's DPH report of 121 deaths. The Connecticut coronavirus death toll — an indicator that typically lags infections and hospitalizations —is currently 9,442.

On Thursday, the state Department of Public Health reported the number of hospitalized coronavirus patients in Connecticut has dropped to 1,917, down 22 beds overnight. The report signals a new direction for the daily hospitalizations tally, just 55 shy of the pandemic record hit in April 2020.

Of those hospitalized in Connecticut, 1,288 (67.2 percent) are not fully vaccinated.

The highest number of the hospitalized —636 — are in New Haven County.

COVID-19 infections in the state have dropped nearly another percentage point overnight, to 20.27 percent, according to the latest DPH data.

The daily coronavirus positivity rate is a function of the number of tests compared to the number of cases confirmed positive each day. Overnight, 9,604 positive cases were logged, out of 47,380 tests taken. The numbers of tests and cases confirmed do not include those taken with at-home self-test kits.

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Instructions on how to get COVID-19 vaccinations and boosters in Connecticut are available online, as is a list of walk-up clinics sponsored by DPH.