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December 30, 2020

Connecticut tops Northeast for percentage getting COVID-19 vaccinations

Photo | Contributed Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz visited the offices of the West Hartford-Bloomfield Health District on Monday to highlight the expansion of vaccination sites.
By Liese Klein

Connecticut ranks number one in the Northeast in the percentage of its population that has been vaccinated for COVID-19 and number six nationally, state officials said Wednesday.

A total of 54,727 people had received their first dose of the vaccine statewide by noon on Wednesday, Gov. Ned Lamont announced in his last scheduled COVID-19 briefing of the year. 

All of those covered under Phase 1 of the vaccination campaign ‒ frontline health workers and nursing home residents ‒ are slated to get both doses of the vaccine by the end of January. All nursing home residents and workers across the state are expected to be vaccinated by the end of next week. 

Connecticut has outperformed many states in its vaccination rate because of its robust public health infrastructure due to prior flu-fighting efforts, state officials agreed.

“A lot of things are working well,” said Deidre Gifford, acting commissioner of the Department of Public Health. "Nobody wants to see a dose of this vaccine sit on the shelf too long or be wasted." 

Public-health labs across the state are also on the lookout for the new, more-contagious strain of COVID-19 rampaging through the U.K. Private companies like Jackson Laboratory in Farmington and Stamford's Sema4 have pledged to assist with high-frequency genomic sequencing to definitively identify the new strain in samples, Gifford added. 

Vaccination efforts have also begun at Hartford-area health departments as part of the larger ramp-up of the campaign. 

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz visited the offices of the West Hartford-Bloomfield Health District on Monday to highlight the expansion of vaccination sites. The district received 500 doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine last week and started vaccinating front-line healthcare workers and first responders. 

With New Year’s Eve hours away, Lamont emphasized that rules on early closing at bars and restaurants would be enforced despite the holiday.

“We're going to be strict ‒ 10 o’clock is 10 o’clock,” Lamont said. “This is no excuse to let our guard down and go backwards.” 

Lamont added his own New Year’s resolution: “Let’s get to 2021 as fast as we can.”

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