Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2021 Page 9
Bobbie Bagley, Director of Public Health and Community Services
Thank you Dr. Storace.
At this time, what I'd like to be able to do is to provide a situational update. | am going to share my screen because
what this allows for the Board of Aldermen to see our current situation in our State right now. This is really important
because as Dr. Storace mentioned, what you can see from here is where our State is with regards to the infection. So
right now, as of today, New Hampshire announced 561 new cases and that's an average of over 1,054 cases per day.
That's for the most recent seven day period. This is a 17% decrease compared to the previous seven days. What |
would like to is bring your attention to here, where you can see this spiked up with regards to where we are right now.
This is around the holiday season, you can see how these numbers started to go up as we would see a trending occur
with Thanksgiving, with travel, with families getting together, friends getting together. But then you can also see that
we're now starting to turn down. Again, we're post the holiday season from Thanksgiving so we would expect to see a
trending down of cases.
What we're looking to do is to put this extra layer protection, the mask mandate in place because we're going down
and we don't want to see those numbers spike back up. From this data that's here, what you can see is right now
we're looking at the number of total cases as the pandemic started for the State of New Hampshire over 187,000 with
7,971 active cases. You'll also see our vaccination rate. One of the metrics and one of the measures that we have in
place to help with the stop of this infection - 57.7% fully vaccinated or 62% that have received at least their first dose.
This vaccination rate is still too low for us to be able to have the impact that we want to on the substantial spread that
we're seeing in our State right now. I'm going to show you some Nashua numbers as well because our numbers in
Nashua are higher that what we see at the State rate.
Our percent positivity rate is at 12.1% and that's a seven day positivity rate with an average of about over 9,000 tests
that are done daily. We've seen these testing numbers go up and down anywhere from 10,000 to 8,000. We need to
see those numbers increase as well. A lot of what we're also seeing here is also an under representation of what
we're truly seeing in our State because everyone doesn't go to get tested and folks asymptomatic, they may not go
get tested on either but they can still spread the infection.
We currently, and this is one of the most serious measures that we're looking at, our hospitalization rate is at 437
individuals in the hospital. People that are in the hospital now they're sicker. They're also younger and it's going
across the age groups. It's going across all demographics. There is no — with this virus, it doesn't care who you are,
where you work, and what age you are. We've also had over 1,800 deaths in our State and our numbers in the State
are averaging anywhere from six to eight deaths per day.
Now when we look at our Nashua numbers, what you can see the new case rate per 100,000 for Nashua is at 1,198.
That's a high number. We're looking for that number to be under 100 and we haven't been there in almost a year.
Our seven day test positivity rate is at 14.9%. Again, a high number. We like to see that under five. We haven't seen
that in a while either. Our new cases over the last 14 days over 1,000 cases and for the last 14 days sorry, and then
for the new cases or active cases 562. So we're looking at a substantial amount of spread this in our community and
this is right now on the downward trend. Because we've seen what happens with COVID, and with us, and our social
behaviors, we tend to go down. The next holiday comes we go back up. But we are already extremely high right now.
This is a 25% increase just between Thanksgiving and where we are right now as of December 2" 25% increase.
We're trending down. We'd like to stay down.
The request for the temporary mask covering over the next four weeks is to help us stay down. Keep these numbers
down. We've heard from our hospitals the impact that this virus is having on them with individuals now needing more
acute care. ICU beds are full. The capacity at the hospital is strained and the impact of an increase - another spike
up is going to be detrimental to our hospitals and you're going to hear more information from our clinicians on this as
well.
So our goal is really to have an impact over this next four weeks and keeping these numbers down. It's unfortunate
that in New Hampshire we had the first announcement of a pediatric death. This is something that we have been
trying to prevent since this pandemic began. We've seen numbers of kids in other States that have been infected.
There have been kids that have lost and it's been documented now that we've lost our first one. One child death is
too many. If putting a simple covering over our mouths will help prevent the continuation of transmission in our
communities, that's what our aim is. At this time, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Cappetta who will give more signs from a
medical perspective on this.
