With Covid-19 cases declining and hospitalizations beginning to tick down, Vermont officials spent much of their weekly Covid press conference discussing the need to shift state attention to issues other than the virus.
“There’s not much new for me to say on the Covid front other than I’m very encouraged, so I’m going to focus my remarks on other topics,” Gov. Phil Scott said Tuesday, and he proceeded to talk about his workforce development plan and mental health in Vermont.
The state is planning for a new phase of coexisting with the virus, Health Commissioner Mark Levine said.
“Many of us in public health believe Omicron has hastened our pathway to the endemic state, meaning a time when the virus is constantly present in our population, a permanent or hopefully milder part of our lives,” he said.
He likened it to the flu, which can be dangerous but is managed through “regular vaccinations and good prevention practices,” rather than urgent public health orders.
In that future stage, the number of new infections would be less important than tracking hospitalizations, viral levels in wastewater and focus testing of at-risk populations, he said.
He said the health department would like to concentrate more on other health issues that have arisen during the pandemic, such as mental health concerns, chronic health conditions and other infectious diseases.
The Delta surge of Covid-19 coincided with a rise in non-Covid-related deaths that reached their highest point in years, federal data showed, driven by suicides, overdoses, delayed health care and crowded hospitals.
“The public health surveillance data continues to be collected. That’s not the issue,” Levine said. “It’s really the ability of public health and all of us together to focus on all of the issues at a time when a pandemic is occurring and lots of mitigation is going on.”
Vermont is already taking one step toward changing its Covid-19 data strategy. It will no longer publish Covid-19 case counts on weekends, something it had done throughout the pandemic, Levine said.
Experts interviewed by VTDigger last week agreed that the less severe Omicron strain was a reason for cautious optimism but warned that the virus could mutate at any point and lead to another wave of an infectious variant.
Omicron is far from over in Vermont, but the latest state data shows that case counts have declined significantly. The state reported a seven-day average of 669 infections per day on Tuesday, down 40% in the past week, said Mike Pieciak, commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation.
For context, the state reported about 400 Covid cases per day in the weeks leading up to Christmas and reached a peak of about 1,900 cases per day in mid-January.
New hospital admissions also declined 10% in the past week, he said. The state reported 94 patients were in the hospital for Covid on Tuesday, the second day with fewer than 100 Covid patients. That includes 26 people in intensive care, a number that has remained steady in the past week.
The health department also reported six more Covid deaths in Vermont, tying January 2022 with December 2021 as the second-deadliest month of the pandemic. The January death toll may rise even higher, as the state often adds Covid fatality data retroactively as death certificates are verified.
Officials “expect to see improvement in the fatality numbers for the month of February” based on state and national forecasts, Pieciak said. In total, 542 people have died in Vermont since the beginning of the pandemic.
[Looking for data on breakthrough cases? See our reporting on the latest available statistics.]
Jenney Samuelson, interim secretary of the Agency of Human Services, said PCR testing will still be available statewide after the latest wave passes because of its utility as a diagnostic tool.
Levine said the state would like testing to “evolve” to use antigen testing for decision-making, symptomatic testing and to decrease transmission when infection rates are high.
“That’s a much more effective way to manage the testing apparatus at a time like this, when we’re still seeing a fair amount of Omicron,” he said.
But when less of the virus is around, he said, “we’ll reevaluate again” based on the characteristics of the test.
How the vaccine affects your Covid-19 risk
The Vermont Department of Health published the latest week of breakthrough data on Tuesday, showing once again that the vaccine reduces the risk of infection and hospitalization in Vermont.
Infections have declined for both fully vaccinated and not fully vaccinated Vermonters, but the rate remains about double for not fully vaccinated Vermonters, the data shows. About 2,760 fully vaccinated Vermonters and 2,036 not fully vaccinated Vermonters tested positive within the past week.
Of the 27 new hospital patients within the past week, 10 were not fully vaccinated, a steep decline from previous weeks when more than 30 not fully vaccinated Vermonters were admitted per week. However, the hospitalization rate remains higher for not fully vaccinated Vermonters than for fully vaccinated Vermonters.
The health department does not release exact figures for deaths by vaccine status but reported that the death rate for not fully vaccinated Vermonters is about double that of fully vaccinated Vermonters.
“Fully vaccinated” is defined as anyone with two shots of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, or one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, according to the department website. So “not fully vaccinated” could include both people who are partially vaccinated and those who have not received a shot at all.
The department data also does not distinguish whether people received the booster dose of the vaccine, but data from the latest model report indicates that boosted Vermonters had a hospitalization rate much lower than that of Vermonters who were not fully vaccinated.
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