CT Working To Keep Hospital Capacity Stable

Connecticut — Connecticut’s coronavirus related hospitalizations reached early June levels on Nov. 1. That still leaves capacity for coronavirus patients, but the state is also trying to work on a backlog of elective surgeries that were put off during the first coronavirus wave.

“We are also to balance that with the fact that there have been an awful lot of necessary procedures that require hospitalization not related to Covid that were put off,” Lamont said. “So, we are doing everything we can to see if we can maintain hospitalizations for non-Covid related as well.”

Connecticut’s coronavirus hospitalizations peaked April 22 at 1,972 patients and gradually came down through May and June. Hospitalizations were below 100 net patients through almost all of July, August and September.

“What we’ve looked at in Europe, looking at in the upper Midwest, we’ve seen those hospitalization numbers can change very quickly,” Lamont said.

Stays at the hospital for coronavirus have been much shorter than the beginning of the pandemic. The average hospital stay was around 14 days at the beginning of the pandemic compared to about a week now, said John Murphy, the president and CEO of Nuvance Health as a news conference last week. Nuvance Health owns Danbury and Norwalk hospitals.

There were more than 48,000 people hospitalized for the coronavirus in the U.S. on Nov. 2, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Around 9,900 people are in intensive care units.