Vermont Business Magazine The Vermont Department of Health reported May 21 that COVID-19 cases are down and hospitalizations also have fallen. But the number of patients with COVID who are still in the hospital increased.
As of May 24, 2022, 661 people have died from COVID-19. The VDH has not reported any additional deaths since May 16.
Report Timeframe: May 15 to May 21, 2022
Statewide community levels: High. The rate of new COVID-19 weekly cases per 100,000 Vermonters is above 200 (case numbers are below). New COVID-19 hospital admissions are above 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: 286.38 per 100K (down from 371 last week)
• New hospital admissions of patients with COVID-19, last 7 days: 10.10 per 100K, 63 total new admissions with COVID-19 (down from 11.22 from last week).
• Percent of staffed inpatient beds occupied by patients with COVID-19 (7-day average): 6.12% (up from 5.27 percent from last week).
Vermont Department of Health recommendations: Protect Yourself & Others
CDC recommendations: COVID-19 by County | CDC
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. The number is the daily average of the previous seven days; for example, the value for May 8 is the daily average for the days of May 1 through May 7.
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, between 5% and 6% of emergency visits in participating emergency departments have included COVID-like illness.
Almost all specimens collected during the past several weeks have been BA.2 sublineages. (Sources: Broad; Health Department WGS Program. Note: Due to weekly variability in the number of sequences sampled, the graph format has been switched to reflect the proportion, rather than count, of variants.)
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.
Reported and Confirmed Outbreaks, Active as of May 23, 2022
1 All Vermont hospitals and two urgent care clinics are included in ESSENCE.
Source: VDH May24, 2022. https://www.healthvermont.gov/covid-19/covid-19-activity-and-surveillance
