The number of cases linked to a summer day camp outbreak in Waterbury has jumped to 25, according to the Vermont Department of Health. No one connected to the outbreak is hospitalized.
People who work with two facilities that care for children, including the day camp in Waterbury, described sluggish contact tracing by the state.
Day camp and child care outbreaks have been relatively rare so far this summer. Since June 1, two outbreaks have been associated with camps and three outbreaks have been associated with child care facilities, according to the health department.
Including Waterbury, there have been 30 cases associated with summer camp outbreaks and 14 cases associated with child care facility outbreaks to date, according to the state. The names of the affected camps and child care centers were not immediately available Tuesday.
“Most of the outbreaks that we see now are of modest size. Vaccine has prevented them from turning into what they would have turned into in a pre-vaccine era,” Health Commissioner Mark Levine said Tuesday during the governor’s weekly press conference. “We see far more what we call ‘situations,’ which are just a cluster of a couple of cases, or a specific site that has a case known that concerns us because of the nature of the site.”
But statewide, cases continue to mount. The state reported 538 Covid-19 cases in the past week, according to the Department of Financial Regulation, up from 293 the previous week. Gov. Phil Scott announced no new broad-based restrictions Tuesday but said certain state employees would soon be required to be vaccinated or face testing and masking mandates.
Meanwhile, the state response to two recent Covid-19 incidents has been subpar, according to officials at affected organizations.
“I have no words for how frustrating this has been,” said Nick Nadeau, the director of parks and recreation in Waterbury. Nadeau said he initially heard about a camper who had tested positive from a family more than a week ago, on Saturday.
Nadeau said he immediately contacted the Health Department to provide officials with the camp’s roster so that they could start contact tracing. But by Monday, he said, he was hearing directly from more families with children who had tested positive who had not yet received a call from health officials.
He said it took four days of haranguing the state — and resending his roster several times — before he was able to get in touch with someone who advised him to temporarily shut down. A public health advisory went out that Friday.
“I feel like we could have avoided some of this outbreak — I mean, maybe we couldn’t — but it’s just been super frustrating,” he said.
Speaking to a reporter on Tuesday, Nadeau said he still didn’t have an updated tally of cases from the Health Department — the last he heard was the 13 reported via press release over the weekend — or a firm breakdown of cases by location. (The municipal summer camp runs programming, split up by age, at three separate sites.)
In response to questions about the Waterbury outbreak, Health Department spokesperson Ben Truman said the department was reaching out to the contact tracing team and will continue to be in touch with the Waterbury camp director.
“Issues of communication breakdown among the parties involved do happen, especially in a rapid response environment, and evolving information is an expected part of an outbreak investigation,” Truman said in an email.
Vermont’s contact-tracing workforce has also changed hands. For the bulk of the pandemic, the state relied on in-house contact tracers hired and trained by the Department of Health, although schools, too, were partly deputized into the effort. In late May, Vermont outsourced the work to AM TRACE, a Virginia-based company.
Cindy Boyce, a child care center owner in Newbury, echoed Nadeau’s frustrations. A staff member contacted Boyce on Saturday, July 31, to tell her they were positive for the virus. Boyce expected to get a call from the Health Department that Sunday, but when none came, she decided to proceed with closing the center and contacting families on her own.
Boyce said she finally heard from the Department on Friday, after she had been closed for a full week. Boyce reopened Monday but required all staff and students — whether vaccinated or not — to get tested before returning.
“If I hadn’t closed — because nobody told me — we would have been worse than what we have,” Boyce said. “Almost a whole week before I finally heard from them. And then they’re rushing for me to get my paperwork piece done for contact tracing. And I’m like, ‘I’ve already done that for you.’”
Boyce added that her most recent experience was markedly different from what had happened when prior cases briefly shut down her centers earlier in the pandemic. The health department then was “great,” and “right on it,” she said. Officials contacted her, hashed out a plan and called parents within 24 hours of being notified about a case.
“I don’t know what’s going on this time around,” Boyce said.