Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2020 Page 22
Alderman Lopez
Yeah | move to discuss.
MOTION BY ALDERMAN LOPEZ TO DISCUSS O-20-044
President Wilshire
Ok.
Alderman Lopez
I’d like to speak on the motion.
President Wilshire
You can.
Alderman Lopez
OK so | am frustrated by a lot of the feedback that | heard in the way that it indicates a lack of trust for our
Public Health Department. Our Board of Health which is not the Public Health Department, it’s two doctors
who have specialties in disease transmission and spread and then a pediatrician as well who has his own
area of expertise as well. These are medical professionals which | think have pretty good insight into this
situation. But my frustration isn’t with the people who were particularly speaking tonight, it’s more that as a
nation this is where we are at. We started this outbreak with believing that we could pray it away, or that it
would be gone by April and that it would not be a big deal even though all health professionals involved
were saying, no this is a major outbreak we need to be taking this seriously.
So there has been a lot of pushback as to the validity of the medical science and the public health
profession and whether or not they are qualified to make determinations. There’s been a lot of individuals
in the public of varying levels of expertise trying to educate themselves, trying to figure out who exactly to
listen to, what’s going on, what patterns are real. And we’ve gotten to the point where we will take what our
own Public Health Department is collecting as data in a transparent method. These are our staff members
that are paid to do this and were working double time through the summer, 7 days a week to manage this
outbreak and we are willing to dismiss them for a newspaper article that somebody searched for trying to
find a specific thing and that’s data. That’s information from now on. When the Board of Health made this
recommendation and when the doctor from the Board of Health spoke in public comment, he outlined
exactly why we were taking these steps or why we were recommended to take these steps in terms of
masks — covering your face versus masks not covering your face, social distancing behaviors associated
with drinking, that kind of stuff.
And that is not what people are choosing to address or comment on. They are instead choosing to focus
on 9:30, why that time? Which is | guess an argument you make for literally any time. Why do you open a
restaurant at a certain time, why is it after 9:30 is going to kill a restaurant? That’s not one of their reasons
for making this recommendation. When you look at the traffic coming from Massachusetts, that was an
early factor, but it is one that people have seized on as the only reason that we could possibly be doing this
while making the argument that if we put a curfew in place here in Nashua, then people will just go
elsewhere. That argument doesn’t seem to transfer over to there’s a curfew in place in Massachusetts so
obviously people from right over the border may be coming right here.
We are asked to look at all of the data that restaurants have as being accurate, more accurate than our
Public Health Department’s data that is collected, more accurate than epidemiologists. But we don’t see
that data, that’s not transparent, that’s not anything that we have access to right now. We don’t have any of
the records or the bookkeeping from any of the businesses that are saying anything from they will 100%
