Board of Aldermen 5-21-2020 Page 39
wash your hands, whether it was voluntary to enact social distancing, we’ve had to put markings on the
floor of every grocery store. We have had to limit the people who were allowed per square footage. We
had to do a whole stay-at-home order. This has not been my experience that people have figured it out and
said, “alright let's do what’s right for everybody else”. | think that the majority of people do, in fact, support
the concept of helping others but given the way virus transmission works and epidemiology works, you
don’t need the entire group to do it, you don’t even need 60% of people in a room to wear masks, you kind
of need 100%, because if that remaining 20% actually has COVID-19 and is asymptomatic then all the
efforts of everybody else is for naught. So while we go through the process of phasing our re-opening,
while our business owners are taking on the financial risk of opening their businesses and investing in new
ways, whether it is umbrellas or buying tables or paying staff on the hope that people will come and
patronize their businesses, | think we owe it to them to make sure their investment is being supported.
We cannot afford to have a second round of outbreak and | don’t think anybody who has lost family or
friends to this, thinks we could have easily avoided the first. VWWhen | go out in public | do not see more and
more people wearing masks, | see people dropping their guard, trying to go back to normal, hoping this all
behind us, even though we know statistically it is not. Even though the increased testing has actually
showed that a lot of less of New Hampshire had COVID-19 than we could have possibly anticipated. That’s
a bad thing, because | think everybody was assuming, “Oh | probably had it back in November or
December and therefore I’m immune”. So when this crisis passes and there’s not enough room in the
hospital for the people who couldn't fight it off, I'll be ok and my loved ones will be ok because l|’ve already
had it. And as was discussed at the public health meeting, not only is not the case in terms of how
individuals that are testing with antibodies are shaping up statistically, but we don’t actually even know if
antibodies do prevent a second infection or a third. We are seeing more and more evidence that this
behaves in a bizarre way where sometimes it looks like it’s gone and it’s not. Sometimes you did beat it off
but you don’t have enough antibodies persisting in your system.
There’s not enough known about how this is cured or how this will be resolved. But we do know how we
can prevent it. And one of the steps that we can do first and foremost in collectively trying to do prevent
this is to listen to public health professionals and prioritize the need that they are communicating to us and
take this seriously. | think as Aldermen we have three choices — the first is we listen to public health officials
and we embrace what they are saying and we act to support what they have asked us to do. Our second is
to ignore them. And our third, | don’t know if this is worse than the last one or not or hope that the rest of
the Board of Aldermen does our job for us so we can walk that political line. | can’t do that. | think this is a
time when we need to signal to the public that we do support public health initiatives and every front line
nurse that has listened to a bus honking or seen somebody flashing a light or holding a sign saying “We
support you”. | think we owe it to them to actually do that. Actually walk the walk and talk the talk.
President Wilshire
OK | have Alderman Schmidt.
Alderman Schmidt
Thank you, Madam President. Everybody is aware of the fact that the Governor is working very hard and
making sure that the re-opening is working well. Everything is being very carefully studied, what can open
when, why it is safer, using science to decide how to get us open again. If we don’t do this right, we are
going to have to go back to quarantine again. If we see the numbers continue to rise, even as they are right
now, if we continue to see them rise, we would just go right back and it’s not going to help us. It’s not going
to help the businesses that are on the edge, it’s not going to help people who need jobs. We really do need
to make people understand that in Nashua we would like you to wear masks. If you can’t wear masks, then
please stay away because you probably could cause more trouble for the entire State. Thank you.
