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Date: 3/31/2021
CHESTER – The COVID-19 pandemic has been largely highlighted by the impact it has had in large cities and population centers, but often discounted is the experience smaller, more rural communities have had in responding to a global pandemic.
Chester is a town of about 1,300 people, according to data from the 2010 census. The town’s pandemic total for COVID-19 cases was 56 people as of March 18. Some medium sized cities in Massachusetts, like Westfield, have reported several times that number of cases in a single week during the worst parts of the pandemic.
Though Chester’s experience with the pandemic is scaled-down compared to larger municipalities, that does not make it any less of a crisis for the small town. The Chester Board of Health has been as hands-on as any town in Massachusetts in dealing with COVID-19.
Board of Health Chair Elizabeth S. Massa immediately began collaborating with the Hilltown Community Health Center in educating the citizens of Chester – and the Hilltowns as a whole – about the novel coronavirus in the earliest days of the pandemic.
Part of the state’s strategy in getting local health officials on the same page during the pandemic was the Massachusetts Virtual Epidemiologic Network (MAVEN), a once seldom-used program that provides a hub for the state to collect and report infectious disease data for each municipality.
“Right now, Massachusetts has every town online with MAVEN. That was not true before COVID,” said Massa.
While many municipalities at least partially rely on the state’s Contact Tracing Collaborative to perform contact tracing after a positive COVID-19 case, Chester has not, in no small part due to its small size. Though Massa has experienced the occasional missed contact, she said most people who need to be informed of their possible COVID-19 exposure do end up being contacted.
Being a small town in a global pandemic can be advantageous, but community spread of COVID-19 provides a unique challenge: Respecting the medical privacy of citizens.
“With COVID, when you are required to contact trace you tell private individuals that they are contacts and their first question is ‘who was it,’” said Massa. “The Department of Public Health had to put out a liability waiver so boards of health can’t get in trouble for divulging the medical information of a private person.”
Massa said that despite the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic and the prevalence of COVID deniers and anti-maskers, the citizens of Chester largely took the pandemic seriously and listened to public health guidelines.
“We used the Chester Community Facebook forum to get information out about COVID. People wanted the information and they wanted to know how to stay safe,” said Massa. “Most people stayed home, they did not go out, they did not do things. As a local Board of Health we were taking their trash to the dump for them when they were sick.”
Massa, like many Western Massachusetts residents, expressed frustration that there was a lack of easily accessible vaccination sites for Chester residents to use. The closest mass vaccination site to Chester is the Eastfield Mall in Springfield, a trip that can take nearly an hour with no traffic.
Though it is not a mass vaccination site, the CVS on East Main Street in Westfield is now offering COVID-19 vaccines. The CVS is approximately 30 minutes from Chester, which is much closer than the Eastfield Mall, but still somewhat out of the way for Hilltown residents.
Massa said she fears that if the vaccine is not easily accessible to Chester residents, they may opt to simply not get it.
“Once Governor Baker shut down vaccines for local Boards of Health, the residents of Chester were not willing to go to the Eastfield Mall in Springfield,” said Massa.
When asked when she sees life going completely back to normal, Massa said that she does not expect that COVID will ever fully go away.
“I don’t think it will ever be over. It will still be a disease, like lyme and everything else,” said Massa.