Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations continued to tick up over the past week due to the ongoing spread of the BA.2 subvariant, officials said at Gov. Phil Scott’s weekly press conference on Tuesday.
The average number of cases each day has risen 29%, to about 196 per day, Health Commissioner Mark Levine said. Hospitalizations increased as well, hitting 35 Covid patients as of Tuesday, the highest since February.
Levine said this was “not unexpected,” given that the BA.2 subvariant is even more transmissible than its viral cousin, Omicron. He also said the numbers so far are “an order of magnitude different than the original Omicron,” when the state reported a record-breaking two weeks with more than 100 Covid patients.
Public health experts have expressed concern over the changing nature of data collection in Vermont, where testing has shifted from PCR to antigen-based tests. They told VTDigger this week that the changing data could be hiding a surge in infections.
When it comes to the next potential surge, “we’re looking very carefully at the slope of that curve,” Levine said, particularly when it comes to hospitalizations.
“If you really start looking through all the news media, you're going to be hard pressed to find someone who will actually predict for you … what the modeling shows,” he said. “Because frankly, we've heard this before: We learn from this virus every day.”
Beyond its typical daily report of cases detected through PCR tests, the health department also released the latest data on self-administered antigen test results reported by Vermonters. More than 1,000 people submitted their test results, with about 790 reporting a positive result, a new high.
Asked about data from The New York Times showing Vermont has the highest case rate in the nation, Levine said, “We've had discrepancies in the data before based on the data that they scrape versus what we have in our own database.”
The latest case average for Vermont on the New York Times website appears to match the health department’s reporting in recent days. The Times reported that Vermont had a case rate of about 31 per 10,000 people, compared to a national average of about 10 cases per 10,000 people.
Levine also responded to news that Philadelphia reinstated its mask mandate, citing a 50% case increase in the past 10 days. He said he didn’t know Philadelphians’ appetite for more stringent restrictions, but in Vermont, “most people are kind of not in the place where they want to hunker down.”
Vermont reported no additional deaths on Tuesday. In total, 623 people have died since the beginning of the pandemic, including two so far in April.