Special Board of Aldermen 12-21-2021 Page 16
As a community, we need to take care of one another and | hope as my colleague Kim Bernard said, we continue to
do so and that we look back on this time and we say we did everything we could in order to prevent our friends, our
neighbors, our family, and our children who you know | still send to school every day really worried about their future,
and really worry about not only their future, their teachers, the staff, and everyone else. So | hope that you will see
the wisdom in this temporary mask ordinance and help us protect one another because we're in this together.
Tony Storace, Chairman, Board of Public Health
| just have a closing story to tell you. | just happen to be opportunistic this week. | was at the office and I'll call her
“Casey”, a patient that I've known before she was even born. Chuck’s right, I've been around a long time. Casey is a
young woman who works in the ICU and so | stopped in and said hi to her and see what's going on. She's a pretty
smart girl. Her parents and Casey have said that | had an influence on her to go into medicine. She's a nurse and
she's an ICU nurse. | asked her how things were going and she said not well. I'm quitting. I'm going to a different
part of the hospital. | can't take it anymore. We're working tremendous amount of hours because we're short staffed.
People are taking early retirement. On one hand, we were the heroes and now we're on an island by ourselves. And,
okay, that's Casey's problem until you're the person that goes in the hospital (inaudible). Now, she's gonna stay a
nurse, but she's picking something that brings her back to reality. This is the problem that we haven't even talked
about what's going on in our hospitals.
| had word last week that patients were taken out of hospitals in New Hampshire and brought to another State
because there wasn't enough room. It's critical. | think that's critical. You can say, yeah, they’re overstaffed,
overwork, but when patients can't even go to the own community hospital, you're in critical mode now. We need to
stem the tide. We talked about enforcement. That's a tough one, | agree. We're not enforcers. We're just giving you
our opinions. | think personal responsibility, we all should be responsible. That's the best enforcement. Do | believe
in having the police come and making somebody put a mask on, staple into their face? No but we've got to do
something to help stem the tide and | hope this is one of the things like we were talking about - part of the arsenal
some of the tools that we have. | just plead for you to give us a chance in the next four weeks are going to be critical
and hopefully we can get to a point where those numbers go down. You saw what the numbers are. You heard what
Bobbie said where the numbers should be. We got to get them down. Thank you very much for your time and |
appreciate that. Questions?
President Wilshire
Anyone have questions?
Alderman Lopez
Wondering if any of the Board of Health members have insight into any changes in the amount of demand or capacity
for ICUs in terms of how healthcare providers may have had to stretch numbers? I'm aware that Governor Sununu
passed legislation increasing the capacity that a hospital could serve. So what does it look like for the health care
provider who is working in the ICU now versus how it may have looked two years ago?
Bobbie Bagley, Director of Public Health and Community Services
Well we had an update from our hospitals yesterday and from their report out right now, their ICU beds are full.
They've actually had to open up secondary units that they're using as ICU beds. In comparison to two years ago, we
were not at this space and if we can remember two years ago, we set up the alternative care site with the thought that
if the hospitals got to the point of being at service level, they would use that as a facility to help support what we
thought may have needed to occur in the hospitals. All the hospitals right now across the State and trying to do an in
surge response - meaning that as their numbers go up, they're trying to redirect some of their room to take care of
these clients that have these higher acute needs. It's gotten to the point right now where we have to have outside
help come in. So FEMA is coming in. The National Guard is coming in. There's additional dollars being spent in
areas to support expanding internal capacity to be able to meet the need that we have right now.
This solution that we're looking for, again, is to reduce the amount of spread in the community so that those numbers
go down. The more people get infected, the more hospitalizations can occur because of what we're seeing with the
Delta variant and now with the rising numbers of those that are impacted by Omicron. So we know that the more
infection is out there, the higher the probability that somebody is going to end up in the hospital because this disease
right now people are sicker and their sicknesses is to the point where they have to be hospitalized.
