In the three weeks since Christmas Eve, Vermont has had 2,769 new cases of Covid, the state’s worst three weeks since the pandemic began.
Officials are warning of a “holiday surge,” a spike in cases that has already caused a rising number of hospitalizations. Vermont recorded a record high of 51 people in the hospital with the disease.
A month earlier, the Vermont Department of Health came to a different conclusion about the three week period after Thanksgiving, during which there were 2,008 cases and a lower test-positivity rate. The data roughly approximated previous case numbers.
At a press conference last week, officials said data from the post-Christmas period appeared to be more similar to Halloween, which kicked off a surge and a ban on multi-household gatherings.
“Imagine that — over the last five days, Vermont has reported more cases than it did for the entire month of May, June, July, August and September combined,” said Michael Pieciak, commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation.
An analysis of Department of Health data shows that cases rose about 23% for the two weeks after Christmas compared to the weeks before, while they rose only 11% after Thanksgiving. Cases after Halloween increased 177%, but they also started at a lower level.
Out of state travel
When it comes to Thanksgiving and Covid, Vermont was an outlier.
The nation’s Covid rate started higher than Vermont’s and continued to rise through Thanksgiving and after, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.
That means by the time Christmas came around, regions around Vermont had a higher Covid rate than ever, meaning the chances of someone traveling to the state with Covid was also higher than ever.
And travel they did. Data from the Department of Financial Regulation, based on cellphone location data, shows that Christmas travel to and from Vermont was higher than at any point since the start of the pandemic — even though the state mandated a quarantine for out-of-state travelers.
(Source; DFR presentation on Jan. 12 — only a static graphic)
Multi-household gatherings
Contact tracing data after the holidays shows examples of some community-based outbreaks and situations, defined as a case that could lead to potential broader exposure, officials said at a press conference Tuesday.
But Gov. Phil Scott said that so far, no outbreaks had been linked to the two-household small gatherings that he had allowed between Christmas and New Year’s.
“We are seeing some multiple family gatherings have been part of the concern, and we’ve contact traced to some of those, but the single-family gatherings with one other trusted family — we haven’t seen any connection there,” he said Tuesday.
Dr. Mark Levine, commissioner of the Department of Health, pointed to a few outbreaks that have been tied to many cases, like one in Bennington County and an outbreak at a church in Vergennes that led to “close to 100” cases.
The health department is currently monitoring 44 outbreaks and 344 situations, times when a case could have led to exposure to a broader group, Levine said.
“We have a few that we can actually say occurred related to people gathering during the holiday period,” he said. “But we don’t have abundant data to say that there were a lot of people going outside the bounds of the guidance.”
He said the higher baseline rate throughout the state was pretty high going into Christmas, too.
“We began Christmas at a higher baseline level, much different than Halloween, when we were just coming out of the summer and early fall,” he said.
The state has not yet said whether the gathering ban will be temporarily lifted again, or whether it plans to implement more restrictions to combat the spread of the virus.