Boston moves into the red as young, Hispanic populations see upticks

Boston’s seeing more coronavirus cases among the city’s younger and Hispanic populations and from house parties as the city enters the state’s “red” danger-zone designation for the first time, Mayor Martin Walsh said.

Town-by-town COVID count

“I definitely have concerns today, more than I did last week,” the mayor told reporters Wednesday. “We need everyone to remain vigilant.”

This week’s state report of how municipalities in Massachusetts are doing with the virus has Boston jumping up to 8.5 cases a day over the past two weeks per 100,000 residents. That key metric was at 7.9 cases a day per 100,000 residents for the two weeks before last Wednesday.

With the jump, the city crossed the eight-case threshold, meaning that Boston is now “red” in the state’s three-color scale for how severely cities and towns are being hit.

Walsh earlier in the day told reporters that such a change was likely, repeating for the second week in a row that the city looks at several different metrics including positive test rate, which paints a rosier picture.

Walsh also said the city won’t be moving ahead with “Phase 3, Step 2,” which Gov. Charlie Baker began rolling out Tuesday. That step involves some performance venues and indoor activities like laser tag to begin to open. He did say that the city would relax some regulations, including beginning to open up food courts.

Walsh added that people under 22 also made up half of the cases, as young people continue to push the rise in cases.

“I am frustrated, and I am concerned” Walsh told reporters, speaking about the house parties. “I’m concerned about the elderly resident. I’m concerned about a nursing home resident.”

The mayor added, “We are better than that. And we have to start acting better than that.”

Walsh also said that “roughly half of the cases” in the past two weeks in Boston have been among Hispanic people.

“We have been for some time increasing our bilingual outreach and geographic outreach based on the trends,” Walsh said.

East Boston, with a large Latino community, has regularly been among the hardest hit of the city’s neighborhoods.

Walsh cited the return of college students as one contribution to the uptick in overall cases, but said it’s not limited to that, saying he’s also seeing house parties — with ensuing infections — among people in other parts of the city such as South Boston.

“We’re seeing increases in both college and non-college numbers,” Walsh said.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/346tmUk