40 Massachusetts communities at high risk for coronavirus a ‘rude awakening’ for state
A disparate picture is emerging across the 40 cities and towns in the state’s coronavirus red zone, with some local officials retracting reopenings and raising alarms about community spread while others vent frustrations at the state for holding up businesses over outbreaks at “isolated” facilities and college campuses.
The number of communities labeled “red” for having a high-risk of transmission nearly doubled this week from 23 last week, according to Wednesday’s state Department of Public Health report.
“This is a pretty rude awakening I think for the city and for the commonwealth,” Brockton Mayor Robert Sullivan said after his city returned to the red. “We need to control this, minimize it and mitigate it.”
Lowell entered the red zone for the first time last week, after the city had traced many of its cases to distinct clusters. Cases have since gone up, and the increase is mostly tied to community spread and not from clusters, according to city officials.
“New cases continue to be identified among residents from every neighborhood in the City and across all age groups,” a city of Lowell spokesman said in a statement.
Worcester remained in the red as it struggled with outbreaks in some of its long-term care facilities, commercial entities and restaurants, as well as a cluster of seven firefighters, officials said at a press conference. They said cases are “not going in the right direction” as they canceled fall sports.
“If we’re going to reverse the numbers and try to get back to a situation where we don’t have to shut things down, we’re going to really have to bear down and be responsible,” said Dr. Michael Hirsh, medical director of the Worcester Department of Public Health.
A completely different red-zone situation has emerged in Middleton, which is home to the state’s highest average daily case rate of 58.1 per 100,000 residents.
Nearly all of the town’s cases are linked to the outbreak at the Middleton Jail that has now swelled to 139 inmates and 33 employees, frustrating town officials who sent a letter to the Baker administration this week saying the state’s methodology “misrepresents the true status of the virus in Middleton.” Town officials are urging the governor to exclude the “isolated institution” from the town’s count so their businesses can move ahead with the next step of reopening.
The state’s methodology “is flawed,” Middleton Board of Selectmen Chairman Brian Cresta told the Herald. “We have I think one, maybe two active cases today within the general population. That’s a perfect example of skewed numbers rendering the color chart really useless.”
North Andover officials sent a similar letter this week in the wake of a cluster at Merrimack College, asking the Baker administration to “consider carving obvious clusters in universities and colleges out of town numbers moving forward.”
Amherst is also in the red zone after a UMass outbreak. About 98% of the current cases in the college town are UMass Amherst students.
But Dr. Yonatan Grad, attending infectious disease physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said, “campuses are not hermetically sealed bubbles. They are within our communities and so as there start to be cases on campuses, we should then expect those to appear in our communities.”
Alexi Cohan contributed to this report.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/30KWbos
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