Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2021 Page 12
President Wilshire
Dr. Storace did you want to weigh in on that?
Chuck Storace, Chairman, Board of Health
Yes. One of the questions | believe you asked was we don't know about whether these masks will be effective
against Omicron or any other variant that comes down the road. When we do know, we'll go to something different.
We can't guess the future. One of the things we can do is we can look at the past and we can look and see what
happens when we use masks to help protect the public in critical zones where you're inside with a lot of people
outside your bubble that you don't know. We can watch those numbers go down. So that's what we're using. We're
looking at those past events and moving forward this way.
The other thing I'd like to just comment on - and it's because like Dr. Chuck said, it's the way we're built. It's the way
we do business in our mind when we help people, we look at prevention. As we all age and we have to have things
replaced - body parts that is never good usually as the original. So | would rather prevent disease than repair
disease. So if we can prevent people from getting exposed to COVID, and we haven't even talked about long haulers,
people who are going to be in the medical system fighting issues whether there's hearing loss, respiratory, clotting
problems, heart issues, they're going to be in that system because they caught the disease. Yes maybe it would have
happened anyway, | don't know. If we can do it just a little bit to protect, that's what we really should be doing. We as
a community have an obligation to protect the other people in that community. | don't know when in our history we got
to a point where we've said, my rights are more important than the collective rights or health of our community and
that's the sorry thing, in my opinion. | think we all should just voluntarily wear them. | would be happy if everybody
said, you know what, you don't have to mandate. This is something that | should do. In here | know it's right and I'm
going to do it to protect you until we're out of this thing. We got to get out of this thing otherwise, we're going to be
going through these cycles all the time. Especially up in New England because what do we do in the wintertime? We
go inside.
The reports from Africa were great about Omicron but guess what, its summer there. They haven't gone inside. If you
look at Omicron in England, they're having tremendous problems. Now we're hoping with most viruses when they
mutate they dummy down. So what happens is the viruses know that if they kill out all the hosts, they can't survive.
They have to jump species. So the idea is the more successful ones are contagious, but less virulent.
Unidentified Female Speaker
And you know the world completely stop turning.
Alderman O’Brien
Excuse me, Ma'am. You're speaking out of turn. If you speak again, I'll have to remove you.
President Wilshire
| think Dr. Rosenblum has her hand up. Would you like to weigh in on that Dr. Rosenblum?
Stephanie Wolf-Rosenblum, MD
Yes, thank you so very much President Wilshire, Aldermen, Mayor Donchess, and my esteemed colleagues in the
Board of Health, and the Public Health Department.
You have before you some written remarks in support of implementing the mask mandate in Nashua and what I'd like
to do is build on the remarks that | gave last week and also address some of your questions. We have heard from
experts that a COVID-19 viral blizzard is about to hit the United States. As you have heard, our hospitals are already
overwhelmed. There was a question previously that talked about people who said they won't wear masks and
businesses that are concerned about enforcement. I'm concerned about those things but hiring people to assist
people with enforcement by providing them with masks and providing them with education is something that's doable.
What's not doable is quickly building more ICU beds and staffing those beds.
You saw the statistics from Director Bagley. What we know is that people that get hospitalized with COVID-19 spend
a week or two in the ICU. So it's not just the number, but it's the length of stay and what is going to happen when one
of us has God forbid in an accident, or has a heart attack, or a stroke, or other infections, complications of cancer
