Mandate Requires CT Nursing Home Staff To Get COVID-19 Booster

CONNECTICUT — A new mandate from Gov. Ned Lamont requires staff and contractors of long-term care facilities and state hospitals to receive a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot. Workers will not have the option to test instead.

The deadline for the jab is Feb. 11. Facilities who fail to comply will face a $20,000 civil penalty per day. In addition to nursing homes, the order covers assisted living facilities, managed residential communities, residential care homes, intermediate care facilities and chronic disease hospitals.

Member hospitals of the Connecticut Hospital Association have voluntarily agreed to require their employees get boosted, as well. The deadline for those employees is a rolling one, depending upon their eligibility.

The new orders (Executive Order No. 14B and Executive Order No. 14C) are similar to ones he issued last summer (Executive Order No. 13F and Executive Order No. 13G) that required these employees to receive their initial COVID-19 vaccination doses by Sept. 27, 2021.

Lamont said the new executive orders will "pay dramatic dividends. It will open up capacity in our hospitals, make it easier to transfer people from hospitals to the nursing home, and allow us to get back to more regular and normal hours..."

Social Services Department Commissioner Deidre S. Gifford said the state is taking action to quash a rise in COVID-19 cases in the care facilities. There were 1,400 cases of the virus confirmed among long-term care facilities staff this week, up from about 700 last week, Gifford said. Resident cases this week were up to 632 this week, compared to around 200 the previous week.

Over 80 percent of the residents in Connecticut long-term care facilities are boosted, "but we haven't seen that kind of really significant level of booster shots in our long-term staff," Gifford said.

COVID-19 hospitalizations continue their dramatic upward trajectory. An additional 108 beds were filled in the past 24 hours, to bring the current number to 1,784, less than 200 from the pandemic high of 1,972, recorded in April 2020.

On Thursday, Lamont attributed the continued climb in coronavirus-related hospitalizations to the state's high infection levels, "fair number" of breakthrough infections, and the unvaccinated population.

The way the coronavirus accounting is handled by the state has contributed to the urge as well, the governor said. About a third of the "hospitalized cases" are asymptomatic. They were only logged by DPH because they were routinely tested for COVID-19 after being admitted for surgery or another ailment, and confirmed positive.

In the Nutmeg State, the number of coronavirus-associated deaths has been on the rise since the start of December.

One hundred and twenty-one residents have died from COVID-19 over the past seven days, up from last week's DPH report of 83 deaths. The coronavirus death toll in the state is currently 9,281.

Lamont called the latest death toll "low," compared to the tally of COVID-19 fatalities at this point a year ago.

Gov. Ned Lamont described the current daily coronavirus positivity rate of 22.81 percent as "about the same as where we've been for weeks, so perhaps it's flattening out."

About 90 percent of the new infections in the state are from the highly-transmissible omicron variant, Lamont said.

There were 8,823 new confirmed cases, from 38,674 tests, added in the past 24 hours.

New Haven County has 602 of its residents hospitalized with the virus, the most of any Connecticut county.

According to state health officials, of the 1,784 patients currently hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, 1,213 (68 percent) are not fully vaccinated.

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