Vermont Business Magazine The Vermont Department of Health reported June 8 that COVID-19 cases are down and hospitalizations also have fallen. Deaths attributed to COVID-19 stand at 673. There has been only one death in June after 32 in May. May saw an increase in fatalities from April and March.
Report Timeframe: May 29 to June 4, 2022
Statewide community levels: Low. The rate of new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 Vermonters is below 200. New COVID-19 admissions are below 10 per 100,000 Vermonters per day, and the percent of staffed hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 is below 10%.
• New COVID-19 cases, last 7 days: 155.13 per 100K (236.7 the previous week)
o Weekly Case Count: 968 (decrease of over 500 from previous week)
• New hospital admissions of patients with COVID-19, last 7 days: 8.33 per 100K (10.3 pervious week)
o 52 total new admissions with COVID-19 (decrease from previous)
• Percent of staffed inpatient beds occupied by patients with COVID-19 (7-day average): 3.45% (decrease from previous week)
Vermont has the second fewest deaths per capita in the US (107 per 100,000), behind only Hawaii (103). Mississippi (419) and Arizona (417) have the highest rates. There have been 1,031,613 COVID-19 related deaths in the United States.
There were 49 COVID-19 related fatalities in Vermont in September 2021, and 47 deaths in October, which are the fifth- and sixth-worst months on record. There were 42 fatalities in November, 62 in December, and 65 in January 2022, 59 in February, 17 in March, 19 in April and 32 in May (as of June 1 data), as fatalities rose early in the month before falling off. There has been one death in June. The Delta variant caused a surge in COVID-related fatalities last fall and into the winter.
More than half of all deaths overall have been of Vermonters 80 or over.
While the highest concentration of deaths were from last September through February, December 2020 was the worst month with 71.
The seven-day rolling average of hospital patients admitted with a laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection peaked in January 2022 and increased again throughout April and into early May, and has trended downward since. The number is the daily average of the previous seven days; for example, the value for May 28 is the daily average for the days of May 21 through May 27.
Syndromic Surveillance
Vermont is using the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE), which provides all individual emergency department visits from participating emergency departments1 to identify Emergency Department visits for COVID-Like Illness (CLI).
During this reporting period under 5% of emergency visits in participating emergency departments have included COVID-like illness. This is the lowest proportion since the beginning of April 2022.
The Health Department has not received an updated sequencing file from the Broad Institute since the last update. The VDHL sequencing data from May is almost exclusively BA.2 and subvariants, with 4 sequences of BA.4. (Sources: Broad; Health Department Whole Genome Sequencing program.)
1 All Vermont hospitals and two urgent care clinics are included in ESSENCE.
In addition to Vermont’s NWSS sites, the City of Burlington has been collecting samples in collaboration with the Health Department and research partners at the University of Vermont and at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Burlington has been collecting data since August 2020, and reports on the 24-hour viral concentration (as genomes per liter) of SARS-CoV-2 ribonucleic acid (RNA) collected at the city’s three wastewater plants.
Note: Race/ethnicity information is missing for 4% of vaccinated individuals. Population denominators are from 2019 population estimates so percentages shown are an estimate which may vary from the true proportion in the population, particularly for smaller groups. “Up to date” means a person has received all recommended doses in their primary series of COVID-19 vaccine, and one booster dose when eligible.
COVID-19 vaccination rates for Vermonters who identify as Pacific Islanders or Native American, Indigenous, or First Nation have been substantially lower than rates for other Vermonters. In addition, the number of people in the Vermont Immunization Registry who identify as Pacific Islanders or Native American, Indigenous, or First Nation are much lower than our Vermont Department of Health population estimates. These findings could be due to one or more of the following:
1) Pacific Islanders and Native/Indigenous Americans are less likely to report their race.
2) Pacific Islanders and Native/Indigenous Americans are receiving fewer vaccinations.
3) Health Department population estimates are overestimating the true population.
4) Race and ethnicity are collected by providers in a way that does not align with how people identify.
Source: VDH www.healthvermont.gov 6.8.2022