Even as the number of new Covid cases is leveling off — possibly even declining — Vermont continues to report new deaths, according to data from the Department of Health.
The state reported 73 Covid cases on Wednesday, a decline from the previous three-day average of 101 and in line with reports that the state is not experiencing a surge from Thanksgiving.
But it also added five more deaths for a total of 105, 47 of which have occurred during the latest wave of the pandemic. There’s reason to believe that deaths may continue even after Vermont passes through its latest peak.
According to research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, deaths from Covid tend to occur two to eight weeks after the initial case comes to light. That means we won’t know the true death toll from November’s high numbers until the end of the year.
And even as the virus plateaus, some of the latest cases have been in high-risk populations such as long-term care facilities, which have had 372 cases in this latest wave, including 94 in the past week.
Dr. Mark Levine, head of the Department of Health, has blamed high rates of virus spread in the community for the spread into nursing homes, carried in by facility staff and transferred to patients.
“It’s that ability of the virus to come into the facility unbeknownst to anyone because they have no symptoms, and maybe even multiple people at a time. And then, through some of the other staff, or even the residents, not having symptoms but having the virus when you don’t know it,” Levine said at a press conference last week.
The state reports that 30 people are hospitalized with the virus, a jump from only 20 the previous day. Six people were in the ICU.
The number of people currently hospitalized for the virus has generally been between 20 and 30 people a day. It’s unclear how many people are newly admitted on a given day, or how long any of those 30 patients have been at the hospital; the state doesn’t disclose that information.
State data shows the average hospital stay for Covid has been about eight days since the start of the pandemic. If that’s true of the latest wave of the pandemic, the number of people hospitalized, like deaths, will continue to lag behind case data.
Vermont hopes its first wave of vaccinations will go to some of the people most at risk of Covid complications, including patients at the most concerning long-term care facilities.
It also plans to vaccinate health care workers at high-risk locations, including long-term care. One in eight Covid cases has been a health care worker, although only 14 have been hospitalized and none have died, Department of Health data shows.
— Erin Petenko
