CONCORD — Gov. Chris Sununu said he led an eight-person delegation Monday to Kentucky to see how that southern state was coping with record rates of COVID-19 taxing its health care system.
Bedford inventor Dean Kamen provided his airplane at no cost to bring Sununu, five other state agency staff and two hospital executives from Portsmouth and Plymouth for this day-long visit, according to state officials.
“Like New Hampshire, Kentucky is a rural state with small cities,” Sununu said in a statement.
The trip was to “help inform our decision-making in the weeks and months ahead to see how they are handling their COVID surge, how hospitals are managing through this crisis, and to hear what tools they have found to be effective in battling this most recent wave ...,” Sununu said.
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Raymond Buckley questioned if Sununu picked Kentucky because it’s the home state of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been leading the Capitol Hill lobbying effort to convince Sununu to run for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
The other U.S. senator from Kentucky is Rand Paul, a 2016 presidential candidate and leading critic of the Biden administration’s support for states or communities that have imposed mask and vaccine mandates.
“Both Memorial Hospital in Conway and Dartmouth-Hitchcock have announced that they are once again taking emergency measures because of the surge in COVID cases. Why isn’t Chris Sununu visiting them, or visiting Vermont and Maine, both rural states that have surpassed New Hampshire in vaccinating their citizens, reducing the risk of COVID surges,” Buckley said.
“Sununu needs to answer serious questions about why he is ditching New Hampshire to travel to Mitch McConnell’s home state.”
Benjamin Vihstadt, Sununu’s communications director, said all state agency officials will file financial disclosure reports about this trip.
The state’s Executive Branch Ethics Code requires the governor, agency heads and all their employees to annually report on the reimbursement of expenses they receive from a private individual while doing government business.
Sununu and other agency heads who’ve already filed an annual report won’t have to report these expenses until next January.
Maintaining hospital staffing a key topic
Sununu said the group got some good tips about how to maintain adequate staffing in the face of a crisis.
“It’s making sure that not only are you maintaining the staffing levels, but putting in a system in place that keeps the emotional wellbeing and the health of the staff up,” Sununu said.
“It’s asking a lot of our health care folks — there are long hours, there may be quarantine situations that keep certain staffing levels low, and there are a variety of variables as to why staffing were an issue.”
The number of hospitalizations in New Hampshire has gone up four-fold since Aug. 1 to 123 confirmed with COVID-19 in hospital beds, HHS officials reported Monday.
Sununu said the health care system here is not yet over-stressed.
Total hospital bed capacity in the state hasn’t changed much in the past month, though hospitals in the Seacoast Hospital Group report they now have 8% of unused beds in their intensive care units.
State officials joining Sununu on the trip were Health and Human Services Commissioner Lori Shibinette; Jonathan Ballard, HHS’s chief medical officer; N.H. National Guard Adjutant Gen. David Mikolaities, and Jayne Millerick, the governor’s chief of staff.
The two private hospital officials on the trip were Speare Memorial Hospital CEO Michelle McEwen and Portsmouth Regional Hospital Emergency Room Medical Director Marc Grossman.
“Cross-state collaboration and communication remains key as we continue to see increased cases across the country,” Sununu said.
With 4.5 million people, Kentucky has three times New Hampshire’s population and in the past week that state has dealt with a dramatic surge of the virus due to the more contagious delta variant.
To date, Kentucky has had five times more cases and deaths from COVID-19 than New Hampshire since the onset of the coronavirus.
In the past week, New Hampshire has averaged 300 COVID-19 positive tests a day; Kentucky has averaged nearly 3,700 daily positive tests over the same period.
Sununu, a three-term Republican, met Monday morning at the state capital with Gov. Andy Beshear, serving his first term since first taking office in 2020.
Kentucky has had six straight weeks of increased hospitalizations due to COVID-19 with more than 2,1000 patients compared to the 239 it had on July 14.
Kentucky ICU patients soar
The number of patients in the ICU with COVID-19 in Kentucky went up nine-fold during that time and there are 338 on ventilators, 13 times more than there were back on July 14.
The positive test rate for COVID-19 in that state crested at 13.5%, a record high since the pandemic began.
Last week, Beshear said it was too bad the state of emergency ended in Kentucky because it meant he was unable to unilaterally issue a mask mandate or other restrictions without the support of lawmakers.
In Kentucky, 32 of 96 hospitals have staffing shortages and Beshear has deployed National Guard strike teams to go to the hardest-hit hospitals and help free up other staff there.
About 55% of Kentucky’s eligible residents are vaccinated, which is lower than New Hampshire, but it has shot up in recent weeks as cases of the virus have surged.
Like other states, Kentucky created a special lottery, offering five $1 million prizes reserved only for those who had gotten the shot.
