Despite Connecticut officials’ repeated pleas for residents to stay home and avoid large gatherings this Thanksgiving, local medical experts predict the holiday will bring a spike in COVID-19 cases.
“It’s all kind of this set up that you would expect for a rise in cases: colder weather, communal gathering, indoors and the travel piece of it as well,” said Dr. David Banach, an epidemiologist at UConn Health. “All those factors together would lend itself to increasing cases.”
Connecticut has already seem a dramatic increase in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths this fall, with the number of patients hospitalized with the disease rising from 42 in late August to 875 on Monday.