Board of Aldermen 01-12-2021 Page 8
And then what we see is that spread can occur in infants and it does increase the spread to grandparents
or older people that are in the home that then allows for there to be the opportunity for hospitalization and
unfortunately can result even in death. So that vulnerable population is also threatened when there’s that
family impact as well.
We have also learned and we also see that families that have lower income are also stressed and they
suffer more economic impact as a result, of course, if they can’t go to work or they can’t work from home,
that impacts their ability, again, to pay their bills and we also learned about there being increased food
insecurity when this occurs. And with all of those things, our families make up a part of our community and
so then we also see the impact on our communities. COVID itself as a pandemic across our country and
the world, also presents as an adverse community event. And so what that means is that it impacts
children, it impacts the families, you know, in such a way that we are seeing this play out in so many
different ways. And Angela talked about the psychological, so the mental health piece as well.
Currently Nashua has about 23 facilities that are listed on what we call a watch list. And this is a list that is
identified by the State when we report at least 1 to 2 cases and that Watch List is made up of different
entities. And so in particular for this time period, we have seen restaurants and so there’s at least 6
restaurants and bars on the list right now; at least one childcare facility; two healthcare facilities; and three
long-term care facilities. And different weeks, at different points in time through this pandemic, this list
looked very different. And so we watch these things on a regular basis as part of our surveillance so that
we can see what is going on in our community.
We are moving to a Phase where | want to say we are coming, and | know it’s been long Nashua and
Board Members it has been long. We are 10 months into this. We are really hoping to get over the hump
of this and hopefully in this last next three months we can see a change transition and what has been
happening with the cases positivity rates and our percent positivity, just hopefully we see these things going
down. We are looking at how we can come together as a community to recover with our businesses and
economic recovery as well as with our education and academic recovery with being able to get to the point
where we can get the kids back in school, faculty and staff all back in school as well. And then also the
physical recovery because of just what COVID does to our bodies long-term.
We know that in our community we’ve been stretched for resources, we've got volunteers that are
supporting the work that’s being done to mitigate what we are seeing with the impact of COVID. And we
also know and understand that we need to continue to build our individual and our community resilience by
being supportive of one another over these next couple of months. We know, we believe and we’ve seen it
that we are stronger when we work together and we mitigate the spread of this disease. We talked about
for months the importance of wearing the masks, we talked about the social distancing, the frequent
washing down of surfaces, the handwashing, the staying home when we are sick. We know that those are
mitigative measures that work.
The next Phase that we are rolling into is our Vaccination Phase. This is going to be really important for us
because this will actually help us get over that hump and provide some of the protection that we need to
have with regards to COVID. So the Vaccine Allocation, the Mayor talked about this briefly has rolled out in
our State. We have gone through Phase 1A and that does continue. We are still trying to get as many of
our healthcare providers, first line healthcare workers, first line response workers vaccinated during this
time period. We are going to be rolling into Phase 1B which will extend to and include individuals over the
age of 75 as well as folks that have comorbidities; hypertension, diabetes, individuals that are working or
that live in congregate settings. We are looking to move into this Phase within the next couple of weeks.
So by the end of January, we should be vaccinating these individuals as well.
And you can see from the slide with this Vaccine Allocation there is a timeline from December through May
and beyond is where we are hoping to get the majority of those in our community vaccinated that want to
be vaccinated.
