Updated at 4:43 p.m.
Vermont’s Covid-19 levels were “low” in the past week, the state Department of Health reported Wednesday.
Hospital admissions for the virus have declined significantly in the past few weeks, hitting their lowest point since July 2022. In total, 22 Vermonters were admitted to hospitals with Covid in the past week.
New Covid cases have also fallen to 201 in the past week, but that data might be affected by changes in testing Case data is mainly based on PCR tests and does not include at-home antigen testing.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rated all of Vermont’s 14 counties as having “low” Covid levels for the first time since early December. Bennington and Rutland counties were rated as “medium” last week.
The CDC levels are based on Covid hospital admissions, case rates and the percent of hospital beds occupied by Covid patients.
National hospital admissions and cases have also fallen over the past few months, according to The New York Times. (The Times recently switched its data collection to rely on CDC data.)
The health department reported two additional Covid deaths in the past week, for a total of 11 so far in March. In total, 941 people have died of Covid in Vermont since the beginning of the pandemic.
Burlington changes wastewater testing
After two and a half years of data collection, the city of Burlington said Tuesday that it would end its wastewater testing program next week to rely solely on the CDC’s wastewater contractor to track Covid-19 levels at wastewater treatment plants.
The Burlington wastewater program has tested SARS-CoV-2 viral levels for at least three treatment plants each week since August 2020. The city’s wastewater data has more or less tracked with other metrics of Covid-19 in Vermont, peaking during the Omicron surge in January 2022 and the BA.2 surge in spring of the same year.
Nancy Stetson, the program’s administrator and analyst, said the data has proved helpful at some points in the past — such as when city officials wanted to measure how college students’ return to Burlington affected Covid transmission in the city.
But she said the data has remained “stable” in recent months, as vaccinations and antigen testing became widely available. “We weren't getting big surges that led to widespread city action,” she said.
The city plans to continue to send samples from its main plant to Biobot, a CDC contractor, and report the data on the CDC wastewater testing dashboard. This program is funded by the CDC and means less effort for city workers, Stetson said.
It’s unclear if the CDC’s dashboard includes Burlington since the agency doesn’t distinguish between it and other Chittenden County sites. Experts say wastewater testing can provide a more complete picture of Covid in a community, but individual data points can be variable, so it’s best to use the data to understand general trends.
In total, eight wastewater testing sites are participating in the CDC program, according to the CDC dashboard. Most of those sites indicate low Covid levels in recent weeks.
“I think it's worth sort of keeping an eye on it in case things do change significantly,” such as the arrival of a new variant, Stetson said. “And I do think by tracking through the CDC program, and also having the experience of setting up our own program, we know now that we can return to it if something comes up that we want to be able to test for again.”