With college students returning to campuses in phases this month, Gov. Phil Scott is introducing a tool to help Vermont cities and towns restrict gatherings.
Scott on Friday extended Vermont’s state of emergency — in place since March 13 — to Sept. 15 and signed an amendment to an earlier executive order. The amendment gives cities and towns more leeway to lower the limit on the size of social gatherings. Vermont now limits gatherings to no more than 75 people indoors and 150 outdoors.
The order also allows towns to curtail operating hours of bars and clubs, which are operating under capacity limits already. The executive order is needed because cities and towns aren’t normally permitted to exercise their own emergency powers in a way that comes into conflict with state rules, according to the governor’s office.
“It appears uncontrolled parties and crowds of bars and clubs are a big part of the problem,” Scott said at his regular Covid-19 press briefing Friday of the infection rate. The U.S. has recorded more than 5 million cases of the virus, although Vermont’s infection rate remains among the lowest in the country. “Giving our towns, especially the college towns, some additional mitigation measures to work with, is the right thing to do.”
Community members in college towns such as Burlington and Middlebury have closely questioned college opening plans, saying that they’re not confident the schools’ safety measures will keep the community safe from an outbreak. Scott said his new order was a response to those questions. He said state officials have learned a lot since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in March.
“Our response has been one of the most effective in the country, and we continue to adapt our approach based on new facts and the data,” he said.
State officials have said one University of Vermont student who lives out of state tested positive for Covid-19 before traveling to the state. Health Commissioner Mark Levine said one positive case on any campus this fall will not spur a college-wide or community-wide testing program.
Instead, the health department will use contact tracing to find those who need to stay isolated, Levine said. “We will strategically target testing to each situation.”
After increasing earlier this summer as cases rose sharply nationwide, the number of Covid-19 infections is now declining slightly in the Northeast, said Mike Pieciak, the commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation. Pieciak is in charge of Covid-19 modeling for the state.
Cases in the Northeast dropped 7% last week, the largest decline in nearly two months, said Pieciak. He added that Vermont has the lowest per capita rate of Covid-19 infection in the country, with 39 new cases this week. Fifty-eight people have died of the virus in Vermont.
However, according to the state’s case modeling, there will be a slight increase in Covid-19 cases over the next few weeks, Pieciak said.
The New York Times on Thursday published a story showing that the number of deaths had risen above normal patterns in several U.S. states over the last several months of the crisis. The Times suggested states might be undercounting people who had died of Covid-related conditions.
Asked if that could be happening in Vermont, Levine said he was confident it is not. He said the state Department of Health recently looked into the question.
“We are bending over backwards to cast as wide a net as possible, to ensure that some case that has connection with Covid-19, even if it was just the contributory cause, gets listed that way,” he said. The death rate is highly variable, he said. The leading causes of death in Vermont are cancer and heart disease, as they have been for years.
With a smaller number of people, cause of death is listed as “respiratory,” Levine said.
While that is typical in cases of Covid-19, “pneumonia is always a common cause of death unfortunately, especially in the most frail of our population,” Levine said. “We really are trying to look at this, and we’re not finding any systemic or systematic problem in how we are classifying the deaths or in potentially leading us to undercount deaths that might be related to Covid.”
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