Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 3
In any event, those are some of the issues, some of the things we have been dealing with. But rather
than talk further, | would first go to Director Bagley on the health front and then to Director Kates on the
Emergency Management and all of the organization that he has been involved and then to Director
Kleiner regarding the need for the funds and how this would be used to enable remote working. So
thank you Madam President.
President Wilshire
Thank you. Director Bagley.
Bobbie Bagley, Director of Health and Community Services
Thank you, Mayor, and thank you Board of Aldermen. We do face a serious health threat at this time
with the COVID-19 virus. The last time we did a presentation was on March 13" and at that time in the
United States the number of cases that we had were 1,629 and today which is the 16" there are 4,464
cases. So this is a virus that is spread very, very quickly and very easily. In the State of New
Hampshire on Friday we had 7 cases and today, on Monday we have 17. And so, again this is a virus
that spreads very, very quickly and very, very easily. It is a virus that also when certain population
groups, populations over the age of 60, our population of individuals that have underlying health
conditions are impacted tremendously by this disease.
Younger people and people who are fairly healthy, if they come into contact with this virus may have
mild symptoms and may not even know that they are carrying the COVID virus. The actions that we
are taking with social distance is very important. The actions that we are taking with individuals who
are sick and asking them to stay at home, it is very, very important. The action, as simple as it is, of
telling people to wash their hands, and cover their cough, and don’t touch your face and don’t touch
your mouth and don’t touch your eyes. These are all very, very important Public Health measures to
stop and to contain and to mitigate the spread of this virus.
What we are doing in Public Health right now is we are trying to push that message out as much as we
can through social media, through the radio, through newspaper, on our web site. As much as we can
get this information out, we are going to do that. We also want to make sure people are informed as
they can be with the changing and the ever-evolving changes that we are seeing with this virus. So
although it seems like, you know, we are hearing about this every day, every day, every day, we think
this is really important because we need people to take this seriously. We do an update once a week
on the numbers as the State puts out a daily update on what they are seeing and the changes that are
occurring across the State.
As the Mayor mentioned, we had our first case reported to us in Hillsborough County, a Nashua
resident on Sunday. | have been investigating that case. Usually with the COVID virus, the
expectation or the average of how many people will get infected when one person is affected is about
2.5. But that depends on your situation; if you are in a large crowd and someone is sick and they don’t
know it but they are coughing or they are sneezing and they are not covering that cough and they are
not covering that sneeze and they are in a large room, they are going to spread that infection to a large
number of people. So these measures may seem to be extreme, but they are very, very important.
Again, we don’t want to put at risk the most vulnerable populations in our community because from
what we have seen with what happened in China and what is happening across the world, in Italy and
Europe, the elderly population is impacted by this greatly. What we are seeing in the State of
Washington, with the number of individuals that have died there, the majority of them have been older
adults that have compromised or underlying health issues.
