Board of Aldermen 01-25-2022 Page 15
MOTION BY ALDERMAN O’BRIEN FOR FINAL PASSAGE OF O-22-003
ON THE QUESTION
Alderman Clemons
Roll call please.
Alderman Moran
Thank you Madam President. | was fortunate enough to join the Public Health meeting as an alternate because
Alderwoman Timmons could not attend. We heard some data from the doctors at the local hospitals and the medical
staff. This seems like a very pragmatic ordinance to temporarily extend this for thirty days. | will have to acknowledge
everyone that spoke on both sides, | think it is very important that the public have public input whether you agree with
something we do or not. | think public dissent is American and we should be doing that as much as we can. We may not
always agree, but we need to listen to each other.
Masks and COVID for me is very personal. | lost my father to COVID. He was 52 years old. So | take any precautions as
you can as serious as possible. With that being said, | also understand that the medical community is not always right
and | am part of the medical community. I’m a healthcare worker. Sometimes we have a tendency to have a white coat
mentality and we tell you what is right and we don't take into your opinion. Fortunately science is pretty black and white.
Yes the efficiency of cloth masks is not as effective as N95 but we’re trying to do something to relieve the burden of our
healthcare workers in the hospitals.
| can say that it seems like that the endemic is in sight and that we all want to get back to living as normally as possible
without masks. | believe that and | hope this is the first and only vote that | would make to extend this mandate given the
data that I’ve been seeing and that | can read and understand myself without having the Board of Health explain it to me.
We are going to have a sharp decrease very soon but | do think the current decreases that we are seeing are in part due
to these masks that we’re wearing today. That’s alll have. Thank you.
Alderman Lopez
I’ve been volunteering with the United Way to help the hospital workers that need to be tested in COVID because they’re
spread very thin. They’re already being supplemented by FEMA doctors. They're already being supplemented by
National Guards people. They’re struggling too. | empathize with the healthcare workers that have to make decisions
about what risk to put their families in while continuing to practice their careers and work in their practice. | hear and see
many healthcare practitioners considering different areas of work opportunities to be educators, opportunities to work in
healthcare fields that are a little bit more voluntary, particularly hospital workers that are being pushed very hard. As
difficult as COVID-19 has been on all of us, it has been very difficult for hospital workers who didn’t get a summer off,
didn’t get that return to the way things were we all enjoyed when our community transmission was low. They've been
working throughout the whole year wearing mask their whole shift - sometimes 24/7 depending on what roles there are.
| Know multiple residential care facilities have created an isolation model where staff have been recruited to stay on site
for two weeks or one week at a time to minimize the number of people coming in and out of those sites. That comes with
it some financial opportunity but also some serious personal sacrifice. | think the medical community has been doing as
much as it possibly could to offset the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic. | think as politicians, we probably could have
done more many, many opportunities and many, many times if we’d known, if we had better perfect information, better
insight. What we do have, we use.
Scientific data is helpful in predicting outcomes and theoretical models. We rely on those for everything from testing the
weather to organizing mass transportation. Those models say or have said that we were going to see the surge that we
saw in January due to holiday in home interactions and we did. The onset of Omicron did start to coincide with that but
there was a prediction that it could get much worse, much faster if we didn’t intervene so we did. We did implement the
mask mandate.
In the original legislation for the mask mandate that we’re discussing tonight, the Board of Health did reserve the right to
revisit it in February because the models show that there was likely the possibility that this surge wouldn’t be low enough
that it couldn’t just return. So as usual, we have the choice between us to stop or keep going. Do we stop what’s working
and potentially let a resurgence happen, let our hospitals face even more overwhelming, oversubscribing | think that was
used in the Board of Health meeting, or do we just assume that everything will go away like a miracle. | don’t see
miracles. | think we need to do everything we can to protect the people that we love. | think we need to do everything we
