By NANCY WEST, InDepthNH.org
CONCORD – On Monday, the state reported 96 new COVID-19 cases for Sunday, 199 for Saturday and 186 for Friday, totaling 481. The state said 53 people are hospitalized with the virus.
But making sense of the overall numbers is difficult as the state Democratic Party and several news outlets have pointed to discrepancies on the state Department of Health and Human Services’ COVID-19 website.
The state Democratic Party headlined a news release Monday saying Gov. Chris Sununu’s vaccination rollout was under fire for misreporting vaccination data, discrepancies with the COVID-19 dashboard and an increase in racial disparities.
Asked to clarify the numbers, Gov. Chris Sununu’s spokesman Ben Vihstadt provided no specifics and criticized the critics.
“New Hampshire is among the top states in the nation for vaccine uptake,” Vihstadt said in an email.
“Just months ago these same people were attacking Chris Sununu for appearing in a statewide PSA campaign urging Granite Staters to get vaccinated.
“These gimmicky political press releases do absolutely nothing to convince vaccine hesitant individuals to take the vaccine and actually harm the state’s nonstop efforts to get as many people vaccinated as soon as possible,” Vihstadt said.
The lack of clarity comes at a time when the highly transmissible Delta variant is skyrocketing in the state.
On Monday, the state’s dashboard reported a total of 93 Delta variants. Three weeks ago, there were only 2 reports of the Delta variant which is being blamed nationwide for much of the recent spike in cases.
On Monday, Health and Human Services spokesman Laura Montenegro did respond to questions about breakthrough cases.
Montenegro said 703 people in New Hampshire who were fully vaccinated have been infected with COVID-19 and 10 died from Jan. 20 through Aug. 4.
During that period, there were 41,413 total cases of COVID-19, which means only 1.7% of all cases identified involved fully vaccinated people, Montenegro said. That’s up from 505 total breakthrough cases less than two weeks earlier.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows most of the United States has a high rate community transmission as of Aug. 8.
The CDC also shows Coos County with high community transmission and Sullivan County with moderate. The other eight counties are all listed as having substantial community transmission. No county in New Hampshire had low transmission, according to the CDC.
New Hampshire slipped from seventh to eighth place Monday in the percentage of the population that has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. It showed all of the other New England states and New Jersey and Maryland ahead of New Hampshire, which has 58.63 percent of the population vaccinated.
Alabama ranked last with 34.84 percent of its population fully vaccinated and Vermont topped the list with 67.92 percent fully vaccinated.