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Date: 3/31/2021
NORTHAMPTON – At the Northampton Board of Health’s March 18 meeting Public Health Director Merridith O’Leary provided an update on COVID-19 cases in the city and discussed her frustrations with the current rollout of the vaccine.
To start her COVID-19 update, O’Leary described the trend in cases over the course of the past four months.
“As of March 17, we have had a total of 1,192 cases since March 12 of last year, about 65 percent of those cases have been from December to March. So far in March we have over 60 cases, in February we had 153, in January we had 272, which was our peak, December 205, November 100, and then it was minute amounts from October to August,” she said.
At the time of the meeting, O’Leary said the biggest places of transmission were workplaces.
“We are still getting enough activity where I do not know what category to put it in. We are seeing a lot of workplace outbreaks over the past two weeks. This might not have a direct effect on our numbers because they do not live in Northampton, but we have establishments with seven plus positive people within their operation and 20 to 30 close contacts,” she said.
O’Leary added that many of the places seeing clusters of cases include the schools, restaurants, schools, colleges and daycares.
When it came to vaccines, O’Leary said Hampshire County is receiving disproportionally fewer doses than other counties.
“Hampshire County, per capita, is the county that has received the lowest amount of vaccine throughout all of the counties in the state. It is not just by a margin; it is disproportional if you look at the other counties and what they have received by capita. I think Berkshire County has received 50 percent, we have received 22 or 23 percent, Franklin County was 34 percent,” she said.
Along with receiving less vaccines per capita than other counties, O’Leary said the Health Department was facing a new challenge every day in terms of distributing vaccines.
“Just as an example, this week they sent us more ancillary supplies including generic needles and syringes. 50 percent of them were bent or crooked, many of them the tips were broken off, the ones that we could use we had a good few people bleeding at the injection site because they were so dull,” she said.
O’Leary also said it was a shame that the state had not used its emergency preparedness coalitions to distribute the vaccine, which they had been planning for over the past 20 years.
“We have been preparing to do this for 20 years. The state has been funding these emergency preparedness coalitions millions of dollars over the past 20 years to prepare for this event. We have drilled and exercised these plans over and over again to get this funding. To have the rug just taken out from underneath us, it hurts, it is not efficient, and it is a shame,” she said.
Despite the vaccine rolling out across the state, O’Leary said there could be another spike in cases looming.
“With people letting their guard down and us just pushing through Gov. Baker’s opening plan, we do not have enough people vaccinated. We are in the eye of the storm, I feel like with these projections we are going to see another surge, and it terrifies me,” she said.
Board member Cynthia Suopis, who also co-chairs the Policing Review Commission, said in her update on the commission that with the final review going before the mayor and City Council on March 30, there are about 12 recommendations for action.
“There are about 12 or 13 recommendations, some of them get into budget issues. We are not using the word defunding or abolition in the report. We are trying to respond to the idea of safety in this report. We know many Northampton residents feel very safe and want things to remain the way they are while there are many that do not feel safe, and we want to work off that premise,” she said.
The commission’s report was recently released and can be viewed at https://www.northamptonma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/16810/Reimagining-Safety---Northampton-Policing-Review-Commission-Report. Reminder Publishing will have more on this report in its April 8 edition.
The Northampton Board of Health next meets on April 15.