Social media is the easiest place for many people to get information about COVID-19, but it’s often a petri dish of misinformation and disinformation. Hartford HealthCare, in an effort to combine ease and accuracy, revived its COVID-19 hotline Monday to answer your questions about the virus, vaccine, testing or anything related to the pandemic.
Clinicians will be available Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to noon at 860.972.8100 or, toll-free, 833.621.0600.
“The reason we’re starting the hotline right now is to engage more community members,” said Dr. Ajay Kumar, Hartford HealthCare’s Chief Clinical Officer, at a early afternoon media briefing, “to be able to ask questions and hopefully address their concerns about the vaccination and drive the vaccination rate even higher.”
Dr. Ulysses Wu, Hartford HealthCare’s System Director of Infection Disease and Chief Epidemiologist, urged people to think of protection against COVID-19 in layers:
- Vaccination.
- Masks.
- Social distancing.
- Hand hygiene.
“And I love the fifth layer,” he said. “Don’t put yourself in a risky situation. Social behavior drives much of these infections.”
The Delta variant, and its rapid spread, upended the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s advice in May that freed the fully vaccinated from masking up in public indoor spaces. But the agency’s about-face July 27 was attributed to an investigation into a COVID-19 outbreak during the Fourth of July weekend in Provincetown, Mass., that found three-quarters of the 469 cases were fully vaccinated. Even more alarming, the breakthrough infections of fully vaccinated people showed a similar viral load detected in cases among the unvaccinated.
Dr. Kumar, who in a weekend op-ed in the The Hartford Courant called for the Food and Drug Administration to grand full approval to both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, said the technology has already withstood rigorous clinical trials and millions of vaccinations.
“This modality of treatment, the vaccine, has been the most scrutinized in the history of mankind,” said Dr. Kumar, “with more than 450 million vaccines (doses) given in the United States and billions across the world. . . . This, actually, has probably passed all the tests at this time and I think the FDA will soon, hopefully approve.”
There have been reports the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, like the other administered under an Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA, could receive full approval in the next several weeks.
The unvaccinated have proved the most vulnerable to serious illness as the highly contagious Delta variant sweeps across the United States.
“We’re seeing the percentage remains 95 to 99 percent of the individuals needing critical care, needing ventilators are individuals who have not been vaccinated,” said Keith Grant, APRN, senior system director of infection prevention.
Call the COVID hotline Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to noon at 860.972.8100 or, toll-free, 833.621.0600.