Board of Aldermen 12-22-2020 Page 21
This is a similar recommendation. As the liaison to the Board of Health | am happy to sponsor it and |
support their position. Reading the Ordinance somewhat, well actually let me go back a little bit. In addition
to making the recommendation tonight, they have met | think three or four different meetings which were
very similar in public turnout to what we have been seeing tonight. Anybody saying, “Oh I’ve never seen
this kind of turnout before” has not been paying attention to the Board of Health meetings. Those three
health members manage their format in a way that they took all public questions and tried to engage in
education of public health principals and need making an effort to try to respond and interact with the
people who were commenting. So they’ve been working on this general issue of outbreak since really
February. More recently they have been looking at the curfew, following its imposition by Massachusetts,
but more specifically as it referred to the Thanksgiving Outbreak which this was brought up in advance by a
member of the public who was concerned, or actually a member of the Board who was concerned about
the runup to Thanksgiving being a known time of heavy drinking of heavy participation in bars. And yes, it
was Stated at that time that that person was observing heavy traffic from Massachusetts after a certain time
period. So that is what initiated the conversation.
The Board of Health had those conversations, they were unable to continue or make a recommendation or
have a discussion among themselves due to the amount of public comment specific to one position. There
was a presentation by the Economic Development Director summarizing many of the concerns that were
raised, but they focused on interacting with people. So they had to postpone the issue because there
wasn’t time, number one — for them to discuss it. And number two — they didn’t want to put businesses in
an awkward position by trying to implement something without providing proper notice or awareness. They
wanted to give the public an opportunity to become aware of the concern and to adjust its behaviors
accordingly.
What they did end up doing was they put out the emergency alert that COVID has escalated and people
should be mindful of not interacting with too much with different parties outside their family. They should
make arrangements to celebrate the Holidays in a non-traditional manner that keeps everybody safe. They
tried to increase public education. They continued to meet, they scheduled a number of additional
emergency meetings and | would like to note that these are doctors and in both meetings, the doctors had
to work around actual appointments that they had scheduled that they were not able to move. And then in
their most recent meeting, they finally had an opportunity to have some discussion and make a
recommendation, feeling specifically that this is urgent enough that they needed to make the
recommendation immediately.
The question was directly asked, “can we afford to wait a little bit? Can we phase this in? Can we try some
other things first?”. And based on their read of the increasing numbers and the models that they have been
using as well as having nationally recognized, this is urgent, this needs to happen now. This is partly
because we have a three-day weekend coming up where Christmas is going to be on a Thursday and then
there will be Friday, Saturday and Sunday where people have for recreational time and then similar
activities can happen next week with New Years. We saw a tremendous outbreak and increase in spread
much steeper in curve then we originally saw in April when we originally had the Statewide lockdown. And
we have been suffering that since. We have had more people who are COVID positive.
Healthcare has been doing its job though, they have been making sure that less people are dying. That is
requiring more use of ICU capacity. The ICU capability that we have in the City is not infinite at all, and it is
also currently flu season so that same ICU Ward needs to treat two major issues that are hitting our City in
addition to the regular ICU cases where somebody may be caught in a fire, or in a car accident or suffering
some other type of injury that requires Intensive Care. So the concerns that the Public Health Department
is reacting to is the increasing stress on ICU capability in the City; the increasing number of adjustments
that Public Health and the hospitals and care providers have had to make and the increasing number of
accommodations in order to handle an increased load of people coming in and presenting a greater risk of
spread.
