The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Connecticut is nearing a record that was set in the earliest months of the pandemic, but some health care professionals argue the recent rise in cases within hospitals may be somewhat misleading.

Roughly 1,939 COVID-positive patients are currently hospitalized in the state, which is only 33 patients off the record that was set in mid-April 2020.

The difference now, however, is that a large number of patients testing positive in Connecticut’s hospitals are not in an emergency room or critical care unit because of the virus.

Many people are testing positive for coronavirus after seeking out care for other medical issues and ailments. Those cases are being referred to as “incidental” COVID infections, but they are counted in the same way in the statewide data.

It’s unclear exactly how many incidental COVID cases there are in Connecticut’s hospitals at the moment, because not all health systems are breaking down the data in that way. But some hospitals are tracking the issue to determine how many people are actually arriving at hospitals seeking care directly because of the virus.

Thomas Balcezak, the Chief Medical Officer at Yale New Haven, said his team is currently classifying around 10% to 15% of their COVID patients as incidental infections.

As an example of that, Marna Borgstrom, the CEO of the Yale New Haven Health system, said Wednesday that roughly 50% of the women entering her hospitals to give birth are coincidentally testing positive for COVID-19.

Meanwhile, officials with Hartford HealthCare explained this week that roughly 30% of the COVID-positive patients in its seven acute-care hospitals did not arrive at the facilities seeking treatment for the virus.

“We have to take into context that many of the patients are requiring care, seeking care, for unrelated reasons,” said Ajay Kumar, Hartford HealthCare’s Chief Clinical Officer.

That’s a big distinction from the last time Connecticut neared 2,000 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in April 2020. There were no vaccines or booster shots. And many of the patients being hospitalized at that very early stage of the pandemic were suffering from more serious symptoms.

Even so, adding more COVID-positive patients to the state’s hospitals will increase the burdens on health care workers and providers, even if those patients are being treated for a broken leg, heart attack or other medical condition.

On Wednesday, Kumar pointed out that treating incidental COVID patients still requires increased precautions, including personal protective equipment and isolation rooms to curtail the spread of the virus in hospitals.

Those requirements still increase the strain on nurses, physicians and other health care employees who work on the front lines in the fight against COVID.

“I don’t want to undermine or write off the impact the pandemic has on society, our colleagues or the health care system,” Kumar said.

The recent surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations should still be taken seriously, health care leaders argue, especially for the portion of the population that is unvaccinated.

More than 68% of the hospitalized patients with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, according to the most recent state data, and the virus is spreading rapidly throughout Connecticut’s 169 towns and cities at the moment.

More than 85,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the last week and a half in Connecticut, according to the official state count, which does not include at-home tests that people sought out after the holiday season. The current surge could also last several more weeks before cases start to plateau in Connecticut, according to epidemiological modeling.

Dimitris Bertsimas, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been advising Hartford HealthCare, said his modeling suggests the wave of cases tied to the omicron variant may not reach a peak for another couple of weeks.

“Unfortunately, I don’t believe we are out of the woods,” he said.

The positive news, he said, is that members of the public have the tools to protect themselves against the most severe symptoms of COVID-19. The state and its people, he said, are “much better equipped” to address this serious health crisis.

“I would like to emphasize again how important it is for the population to be vaccinated and boosted,” he added.