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Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 6

for the next 45 days. So you should be receiving an e-mail from me because we just sent that e-mail
out today. So those will all be postponed.

Alderman Tencza

You said if you have mild symptoms call, in your professional medical opinion, what are mild
symptoms? | think a lot of people, there’s so much information out there. I’ve read that up to, you
know, unless you have pneumonia; don’t call, if you are relatively healthy person otherwise and under
the age of 60. So at what point should people call or present to their doctor?

Director Bagley

So again if a person has traveled to places in our country where COVID-19 has spread in the
community, whether those symptoms are you know a slight fever or 100.4, headache, the case | am
investigating right now has very, very mild symptoms. Their case is travel-related and so because the
person had traveled and then presented with these symptoms, that’s why that person was screened.
The person feels pretty good right now, had a high fever for a couple of days, had some diarrhea but
right now that person feels fine. That person has to remain in isolation for the next 14 days no matter
how well they feel at this point, because they can still spread the infection in the community.

And so some symptoms are going to be very, very mild; in children they may have a little runny nose,
they may have a very slight fever, they may not have too many symptoms at all. But they can also
carry the virus that they’ve come in contact with it. And then there are others that will have very severe
outcomes as a result of this viral infection if they have any immunocompromising situation in their body
where their immune system is weakened.

President Wilshire

So a question about that, if a young person has it and has very mild symptoms that you wouldn’t
consider Coronavirus, but they can carry that virus and pass it on to someone else?

Director Bagley

Yes, they can.

President Wilshire

Oh good to know, thank you.

Alderman Schmidt

One of the issues that they are finding down in Massachusetts is it is actually moving through the
community these days. It isn’t about your travel anymore, it is about you running into somebody who
is just at the beginning of the symptoms, doesn’t know it yet and goes out into the community. | know
it’s really, really important for people to stay in their homes right now. What can you tell us about how
long it'll have to be confined?

Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 7
Director Bagley

So if we think about what we have seen with China, they had their first case in December and we are
now in March. 80% of the individuals who were infected with the Coronavirus in China have now
recovered. It is 2 % months and there are still some cases and so if we even look at some of that
data, the people or the numbers that we know about are those that actually had the opportunity to get
tested. So there are probably quite a few that were not tested either because they didn’t have access
to healthcare or they couldn’t afford to pay for it. And so for the numbers that we are seeing, there are
probably many others that we don’t know about. But we also see that in 2 % months there’s been an
80% recovery rate of those who were diagnosed. So | think as the Mayor described, the things that we
are doing with our mitigation is to try and flatten that curve. So for instance if we get a spike, there’s a
bell curve that looks like this and this is what you saw in China, you just say it just peak up like that,
you saw it just peak up in Italy. With the steps that we are trying to put in place, we want to flatten it
out so we want to spread a little bit longer over time, but we just cannot afford to have the kind of
surges that we’ve seen in some of these other countries, because we just don’t have the capacity with
our workforce, we won't have the capacity with our First Responders. We don’t have the capacity,
even right now, with our State being able to manage the volume of calls that they are getting. They
are at work until 12 and up until after midnight just taking calls and trying to go through the numbers of
investigations that they are doing. So we want to spread this out so that it remains manageable for us
here in Nashua and the Greater Nashua area.

Alderman Schmidt

And our hospitals are prepared for this?

Director Bagley

Our hospitals right now are prepared as they can be, we are not prepared for a surge. We won't have
enough ICU rooms if we need to have, you know, people in ICU especially in those most vulnerable
populations. We don’t have enough negative air pressure rooms and the emergency rooms are on the
floor, if we have a spike in this area, we just don’t have that.

Alderman Dowd

I’ve heard differing stories on when they think this is going to peak. At one point they thought it was

going to be in May but in the Globe, | guess they are epidemiologists, they say it is going to last well
through the summer. How does that impact a lot of things that we are doing right now? Are they
going to be in place for that long or do we not know?

Director Bagley

That’s an unknown. Unfortunately Alderman Dowd, that’s an unknown.

Mayor Donchess

One thing | didn’t mention is what we are proposing is that these policies remain in effect until at least
April 3“ which corresponds with the school closings or the remote learning ordered by the State of
New Hampshire and that we re-evaluate at that time. I'll let Ms. Bagley finish.

Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 8
Director Bagley

It is hard to predict, but again | think the measures that we are taking, | think it is going to be very
helpful for us in our area.

Alderman O’Brien

Thank you, Madam President, just a point of order if | may. Just a reminder to the fellow Aldermen
that | think these microphones are basically, they have to be in front of you if you are off to the side
then the public may not hear you. | know there is 17 of us and very few microphones, so feel free to
share. | think it does go with some distancing so we should be alright so, thank you Madam President.

President Wilshire

Director Bagley, what is the incubation period? So if someone was say in Washington State during
February vacation, the last week of February, would that like it’s three weeks out. The incubation
period should be over by then?

Director Bagley

The incubation period is between up to 14 days and that’s why from the first on-set of symptoms we
are asking people to quarantine for 14 days if they’ve been in contact with someone that has the virus.

President Wilshire

Thank you.

Alderwoman Lu

Director Bagley can you just talk about where we will find the telephone number when you get that set
up?

Justin Kates, Emergency Management Director
The information line?

Alderwoman Lu

Will it be a number that’s currently ...

Director Kates

Yeah so, we will publish that within the next probably few days, once we get the set up. One of our

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Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 9

concerns is that 211 has experienced a substantial overload of calls. 211 is a professional call center,
we are setting up something using city phones and volunteers. So that’s one concern; the second is
Manchester has done a similar initiative and also they become pretty overwhelmed. So we want to
make sure it is right before we set it up. So we will make sure to publicize as far as wide when we do
get it set up.

Alderwoman Lu

Thank you.

President Wilshire

Anyone else have questions for Director Bagley?

Alderman Lopez

| mean how can people help is | think a question a lot of people have on their minds, if you are making
a call center can you get like 49 volunteers to help or is there a role for the public that they can offer
something or even a way for you to receive offers of help and then screen them and then figure out
who is helpful?

Director Kates

So | will talk a little bit more about this on my section but this is going to be an all of community
response. The City Government is not going to be able to handle this, we’ve identified that the State
Government is unable to handle this and frankly, the Federal Government is also unable to handle
this. So just alone here within the City, one of the things we discussed this morning was our
organizational structure for this response. The Mayor’s Office, Cheryl has offered to take on some of
the responsibilities related to volunteers and donations management. So each City Department even if
it is sort of outside of their typical scope, they are doing some strange things that they wouldn't do day-
to-day. So that is one of the things that we are looking at for volunteers and donations management.

The ideas that we have seen that we have leveraged in previous disasters have been around having
some sort of intake form; what types of skills do you have, and then being able to triage those based
on the need that we have. We have already seen in some of these States, the use of volunteers for
everything ranging from helping to set up digital classrooms through delivering meals and those types
of activities. So it is going to be, just that alone is going to be a massive undertaking.

Director Bagley

If | may, we are also looking to recruit individuals in our medical reserve corp and also in our
Community Emergency Response Teams, so through the CERT. We also are looking at the
opportunity that we will have with some of our universities where some of the college students are right
now not in school. They can also help with some of the things that we are going to need. Just today, |
had to make a delivery to a home with food. And so we are going to need that, if our numbers
continue to go up and we have people that we are asking to stay home and isolate, we are going to
need to have that set of volunteers help with delivering food and other things that people may need if
they can’t go out into the community.

Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 10

President Wilshire
Director Kates, you are up.
Director Kates

Thank you. So | just wanted to start off with a couple of simple comments just to set the stage here. In
many cases in the career of an Emergency Manager they deal with some sort of catastrophe, you
know, we’ve seen disasters that are very large in scale. We think of the common ones; 911, Hurricane
Sandy, Hurricane Katrina. When you look at the scope and the magnitude of a disaster like that, it is
typically regional in nature. There’s only been one example that | can recognize where we’ve had a
National Disaster Declaration and that was for Hurricane Katrina and the only reason that that took
place was because of the massive exodus of people who evacuated the Gulf Coast to every State in
the Country. So it wasn’t even that those States were being impacted by the disaster, it was just the
fact that there was a massive evacuation.

In this case, every Emergency Manager across the Country is dealing with this crisis; every City
Department, County Department, State Government and then the Federal Government is dealing with
this crisis. We have so many different mechanisms ranging from the Emergency Management
Assistance Compact where we can move resources across State lines to help each other out during a
disaster, Mutual Aid among local communities. None of that works right now because everybody is
being impacted by this disaster. So what we have in the community is what we have. We have to
leverage not just those City resources, but also the Community Resources.

The other thing | just wanted to just mention before | explain what the City is doing regarding the
responses, the importance of information sharing. One of the things that we have been challenged
with over the past few weeks is while the City has been working remarkably well together with all the
Division Directors, the Department Heads, it has been unbelievable the amount of collaboration even
just the work between what Public Health and Emergency Management has been doing. We quickly,
early on identified Public Health takes the lead on the Public Health Response and Emergency
Management initially was focused on supporting and assisting with identifying the critical Government
functions that needed to continue during this incident.

We are in a moment now where we are getting these reports from the State, from the Federal
Government which we are learning about as Government Professionals, at the same time citizens are.
So when we hear an announcement that we are shutting down schools on the 5", guess when | found
that out? It was at the same time everybody else did. It presents a lot of challenges for us as a local
government to be able to react quickly and try to adapt to those types of conditions. So | will say the
key statement is we have to work together as a City. If we can work together and we have to share
information, we are going to be in much better shape than if we don’t because we are not able to rely
on the State and Federal Government to assist with that.

So just a brief overview of what we’ve done so far. We have been working on this initiative over the
past few weeks now really focused on ensuring that the City Departments have all of the resources
that they can possibly get to enable some ability to function during this crisis. So they have gone
through a process, an exercise with our team to identify what are those essential functions within their
organization? What are the things that they need to do in order to make those essential functions
occur? So whether that be supplies, staffing, access to some sort of an information technology
system, all of that needed to really be documented so that we could provide recommendations on
what functions needed to continue if we had to curtail services.

Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 11

This weekend we finalized all of those plans with the Division Directors, regarding what types of
functions they would be able to continue, whether it be at a facility like the Waste Water Plant or
providing services out in the community that are essential like Fire or Law Enforcement all the way
through what types of services can continue but may be able to continue from somebody’s home. As
you can imagine, it is very challenging to enable somebody to work from home when that is not a
policy that we currently within the City. We are not like the Federal Government where many workers
can work from home; we are not like the private sector where many workers can work from home. So
trying to make something like that work on the fly is remarkable. It is remarkable the work that the
Administrative Services Division has done, and IT to make this a reality. And we still are working
through the final steps and we will get there. But just the progress that we have made has been
unbelievable and | can just say we wouldn’t have done it unless there was a crisis of this magnitude.

So as | mentioned, we have been working on this for a number of weeks. Over the weekend, | worked
with Bobbie to really determine what our future organizational structure is. While Public Health has
been the lead up to this point, one of the things that we did over the weekend was we established a
unified command. And the reason for that is because there are going to be a number of major issues,
major problems that we are going to be dealing with in the coming weeks, coming months. Everything
ranging from the distribution of medications and food all the way through economic recovery and how
we are going to deal with the fallout from today’s action, which was necessary, to ensure that
community organizations, businesses, have the resources that they need to reopen after this crisis.

So one of the things that we did was establish that Unified Command, we also tasked five Task Forces
that we are working to try and build out and develop a plan for. Two of them have been things that we
have been working on for the past few weeks, the first being the Municipal Continuity Task Force.
That Task Force is focused around keeping our City Services up and running. The second Task Force
is the one that Bobbie has been leading for the past few weeks which is the Public Health Response
Task Force and that is focused around current issues, which is you know the contact tracing, the
testing that is going to be done all the way through future actions that are expected hopefully through
maybe vaccinations and those types of activities; so all of that is within that Task Force. And three
others that we recently added; the first one being school issues; so we have worked to integrate the
School Department's efforts into the City response. We had a call with Dr. Mosley this morning so that
we have a direct contact with the School District to enable us to share resources with them and then
identify when they have concerns, can we request those things through the State Emergency
Operations Center.

The fourth Task Force is Economic Recovery. So there have been some efforts to provide services to
business, the Small Business Administration as an example has authorized economic injury loans for
businesses similar to what we would find after a natural disaster or something like that. But there are
likely to be more programs and initiatives that are going to come out of this to assist businesses larger
and small. We need to have our game plan as to how those types of services will be continued. That
Task Force will also be responsible for looking at supply chain issues. So one of our concerns is
around Supermarkets, Pharmacies and enabling them to get back up and running if possible, that is
something that we need to be planning for now even though grocery stores and pharmacies are
completely open. We need to be thinking in the future rather than thinking about what is going to
happen tomorrow.

The last one that we’ve identified as a Task Force is Community Distribution. And so in this case we
are looking at what types of efforts would need to be done by the City to partner with some of the work
that is being done with the United Way right now around the distribution of supplies and other
necessary things within the community. So we work to identify who might be a resource in that case
and we’ve also talked to Community Development about leading that Task Force even though that’s
not something they do day-to-day, they don’t distribute supplies in the community. But they do have

Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 12

experience with transportation systems, the transit system, figuring out what types of community-
based organizations we have here in the City that can assist through Urban Programs or there might
be some opportunity to make that work.

We have virtual operations center, Virtual Emergency Operation Center established, which all of the
City leadership as well as other key stakeholders across the community like our hospitals and some of
the non-profits are on. And what we are using that for is a way to share information among all those
players is to actions that are being taken, announcements that are being made and also requests. So
if somebody has something like a question that comes up about “where do we get this” or “how do we
do this” we will triage that request within the Emergency Management Team and send that to the right
Department.

The other thing that we are working on and we have a meeting tomorrow morning to discuss getting it
formalized is a coordinated effort among all of our Public Relations and External Affairs folks within the
City. So we have a number of folks that are tasked to that day-to-day within the City and because this
is sort of an all hands on deck type of response that we are dealing with, we are going to leverage
those communications professionals, the External Affairs / Public Relations folks to help communicate,
provide press releases, social media updates to all those community stakeholders. So it is a one voice
across the City rather than every Department kind of doing their own thing.

| just will close with one thing that | think is important for the Board of Aldermen to be aware of, but yet
| don’t have all the answers and I’m not sure when | will. There was a Disaster Declaration, National
Disaster Declaration through the Stafford Act, to enable reimbursements related to the COVID-19
response and they are focused around what types of actions the City is taking to respond to the crisis.
There is still a lot of unknowns around the use of that funding related to losses, so say you know if we
had a loss related to revenue within the City due to this, if we were using it to pay employees that
couldn’t work, there are still a lot of unknowns on whether this can be used for those types of things.
However, we do know that actions that are being taken by our Fire Department, our Police
Department, Public Health you have your own set of money that’s coming in from the State; but all of
those Departments are taking a critical role in responding to this crisis. We will be able to be
reimbursed 75% for that incident so that’s something that we have asked all the City Departments to
ensure that they are maintaining the documentation because if you have ever been through a FEMA
reimbursement process, the one thing you know is you have to have all of your back-up
documentation, or else you are not going to get the check.

We also have to ensure we are following all of our procurement rules and requirements or else they
can take the money back from us when they realize that we didn’t follow the rules. So it just important
for all of you to be familiar with, that is something that we are considering when it comes to the type of
actions that we are taking as a City, whether we would be reimbursed or not. It does help us with some
of the decision making, because during some disasters we don’t know if we are going to get a disaster
declaration, so we are a little leery about whether we are going to put a massive investment in
something, whether we are hiring a large number of staff to support something. Well in this case, we
know that it’s there and that we can use for this response.

We are working with Administrative Services as well as all of the other Divisions on finalizing the
implementation plan for our continuity, you know, the plan that was discussed by the Mayor earlier this
evening around Wednesday being close off to the public. And then Friday having our operations
curtailed to only those essential employees that need to come in and serve as like a skeleton crew to
make sure that transition has worked well. That is something that | think really supports what Public
Health needs, what our Community Health needs and will enable an approach for us to leverage
employees as part of the disaster response for the City. So I'll take any questions.

Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 13

President Wilshire

Thank you. Alderwoman Kelly and then Alderman Dowd.

Alderwoman Kelly

Thank you, you were very thorough and | appreciated that. | have a couple of questions; | know you
said, rightly so, that communication and sharing communication is going to be very key; we are at the
front lines talking to people daily. They have questions, so question one — | heard you say emergency
management will triage. Is that where we should start if someone reaches out to us with a question or
a need?

Director Kates

Yes so what we want to do is we will want to send any requests from you know the public any requests
about questions related to the incident to our Joint Information Center. The Joint Information Center is
really that operation where there’s the Mayor’s Office, the PIO, Public Information Officer from Public
Health, the other Public Affairs/Relations folks from all the other City Departments. That way they can
identify who has the best answer for that specific question. And that for right now, send it to
Emergency Management but we do have an e-mail address that doesn’t come to mind because we
just set it up today that we will use to have the public that has a question about some sort of issue in
the community, reach out to the PIO’s from those organizations. Media as well, and all those would go
through that funnel, and we will have all that information up on the City Web Site once the e-mail
address is finalized and ready for the public.

Alderwoman Kelly

Thank you, my second question was how information will be shared with the Board of Aldermen. Will
it just be put up on the web site? Will we get memos when things change because | know it is
changing pretty quickly but also making sure we have the right information?

Director Kates

Sure, so one of the things that we can do and this is another function of that Joint Information Center,
is any of our key updates, we can send that easily to the distribution list for the Board of Aldermen, so
that way you are clued in to what is going on. We can easily do that and make sure that that happens.
The other thing that | would mention is that it is important to stay tuned regarding social media posts,
so make sure that you are following Public Health, Emergency Management, but also our State and
Federal Counterparts, because again, |’ll be honest with you, that’s how we are finding out a lot of
things. You know? People are asking about the whole bar closing thing and I’m like, well, I’m looking
on the Governor's Web Site and the Executive Order is not up there, yet it was on Twitter. So
definitely, really make sure that you are following social media for these official accounts to ensure that
you know what is taking place here during this response. It is evolving quickly and so they are trying to
use tools like social media to get the information out as quickly as possible.

President Wilshire

We do appreciate being involved in updates. Thank you.

Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 14

Director Kates

Absolutely.

Alderman Dowd

Last Friday | asked Senator Shaheen, this is sort of new and reactionary, the Federal, State and Local
levels and | asked her if somebody was recording lessons learned and see what works and what
doesn’t work and keep a playbook so if it happens again we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. So do
we have somebody locally that is tasked with keeping track of what we are doing, what works, what
doesn’t work, so if does happen again, we will be ahead of it instead of behind it?

Director Kates

Yeah so that’s something that we do not do well as a profession. I’m Sure you see we have disasters
all the time and it seems like if you look at the news, we have the same issues, every single time. To
me, | have a passion for lessons learned and continuous improvement. We actually have a person
that was with us in our Emergency Operation Center today that was keeping a log of some the critical
issues that we were dealing with. One of the things that we do after the event is and this not
uncommon, this is not something that our office only does. If we do after action report, postmortem,
the idea is to take all those lessons learned and document them. The challenge is, that we all fail at, is
to ensure that those lessons learned have corrective actions and that we resolve them as they
progress forward. But then also that our successors are aware of those same issues as well as our
counterparts elsewhere across the country.

One of the things that we’ve been doing is monitoring what is going on in other jurisdictions, we have a
number of colleagues and we are using that to adjust some of our tactics and what things we are doing
as an organization. We are stealing a lot of things from our jurisdictions where we will see something
like a sample press release that they are using and saying, “hmm... actually rather than us wasting
two hours’ worth of our time drafting something new, can we leverage this and adjust it for the City of
Nashua”. So we have been doing it kind of both ways, documenting things that we can share with our
partners here within the City but also our partners outside of the City in the future. But then also taking
information, lessons learned, from other places that are actually in a much worse state than we are in
right now and trying to adapt them before it becomes much worse here in the City.

Alderman O’Brien

Thank you, Director, as you know in my past life, we’ve worked together.

Director Kates

Yeah, we did.

Alderman O’Brien

Nothing as serious as this thankfully. But my time on the job | remember the other one the Bird Flu,
but anyways, | am glad what we are doing, it makes prudent sense, shutting down, limited access to
City Hall, to schools. But | am concerned about our First Responders and that’s the Police and that’s