An illustration of the new coronavirus COVID-19. Image courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control.

Connecticut saw a spike in coronavirus-related hospitalization over the weekend, filling about half of the state’s available COVID-19 beds in intensive care units, Gov. Ned Lamont said.

The governor reported that 496 patients were hospitalized with the virus on Monday, an increase of 94 from Friday and the state’s highest figure since the end of May. The figure is double the number who were hospitalized with the virus just two weeks ago.

“We’re watching this carefully,” Lamont said. “We still have a lot of capacity in our regular hospital beds. We have only 50 percent use in our ICU, intensive care. We have the ability to expand that pretty quickly as need be.”

Connecticut’s pandemic-related death toll rose by 27 over the weekend to 4,698 and there were 3,338 new confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19 reported in the state, according to the governor’s office.

The seven-day rolling average of the positivity rate in Connecticut has risen over the past two weeks from 2.18 percent on Oct. 25 to 4.74 percent on Nov. 8.

State health departments are calculating positivity rates differently across the country, but for Connecticut the AP calculates the rate by dividing new cases by test specimens using data from The COVID Tracking Project.