Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2020 Page 44
So the Public Health Department and the Board of Health is pointing us towards this because it’s a specific
intersection of risk factors. Yes, there isn’t specific data to what would happen if you do a curfew in Nashua,
New Hampshire under these exact circumstances. There’s plenty of data over what happens when people
stop getting into a room and breathing on each other, there’s plenty of data that supports using masks and
making sure that there isn’t exposure. That’s exactly what restaurants are trying to implement themselves.
When they keep people socially distanced, when they enforce the masking, and when they are doing the
cleaning. But objectively speaking we are still in the middle of an outbreak, we are still seeing a steeper, a
much steeper curve than we even saw in April and no matter how you want to spin it or cherry pick the data
and make yourself feel better about what the risks that we are facing, the risks are still taking place.
COVID-19 is not taking a political stance, it’s spreading as much as it is able to in whatever opportunity. If
there are other areas that we need to be looking at, then we need to be looking at those in terms of disease
transmission and | trust the Public Health Department to be doing that, because the Public Health
Department has been inspecting all of these places, approved the openings, approved all of the measures
that they were taking, and of course they know what is going on in terms of how businesses are being run.
You have to have their permission in order to run your business and in order to maintain it. So | don’t
understand the dual argument of “they don’t know what is going on” while at the same time saying “well but
we do want to work with them”. Because everybody has been working with them, everybody has been
following the Legislation that this Board passed in order to mitigate the spread. And it was successful over
the summer because we were able to congregate outdoors. Now that we have a higher level of spread, and
less business, it doesn’t really take a lot of data to suggest that it is happening more frequently because
people are indoors and they are spending more time indoors with each other.
So looking at the factors where members of multiple families are interacting in the same space unmasked, is
something that we need to be looking at and that’s why the Public Health is making the recommendation.
It’s also unfortunate that this is unfairly impacting restaurant staff in terms of their economics, but restaurant
staff are also the highest denominator in terms of getting sick at the restaurants. They are the ones who are
having to incur medical costs and medical bills. They are the ones who are taking on the risk of spreading it
to their families. One of the only people that have actually seen in terms of public comment who straight up
said, “I’m responsible for spreading COVID-19 and this something that I’m part of’ was in an email that we
received where a young lady admitted basically that she was going out, she contracted it at a bar and she
spread it to her family members. These are situations that | am sure all of the people who are here
representing the restaurants and who are committed to the dialogue of “we don’t want the curfew to happen”
disagree with, but these are things that we are supposed to be mindful as Aldermen. We are not supposed
to be creating this kind of scenario where people have to choose; single mothers have to choose to expose
themselves and therefore their children and their family to COVID-19 because they can’t pay rent.
We should be doing more to help forestall evictions, make sure that supports are available to individuals, we
should be doing that at the City level and not waiting for the State to do everything. And we should be
looking at how we can actually help businesses with the resources that we have. We have not been
organizing any kind of coordinated meetings for months now. We have not been coming up with any more
revolutionary strategies along the lines of the outdoor dining, we haven't really tried. And | think we need to
be doing that in order to ameliorate what’s going on for restaurants. But we have had the opportunity to do
phased in and incremental strategies over the last several months. When the Board of Health wanted to
make a pure recommendation on what to do back on Thanksgiving, all of the restaurants that are here were
part of that discussion and made public comment and | haven’t really seen that public comment changing
regardless of what the Board of Health is saying. | don’t think we can shift or pivot fast enough to address
the primary issues and that’s lives and that’s COVID-19.
We need to make sure that the outbreak that we are experiencing right now doesn’t reach a point where we
can’t manage it and we can’t contain it any further. And | think if we don’t take action on this, we have two
very likely events.
