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Date: 12/15/2021
SOUTHWICK — When Tom Fitzgerald announced that he would retire from his position as Southwick’s health director, the world did not yet know of the public health emergency that would soon unfold.
Now he’s back, filling in as health director on an interim basis, a fresh face on the front lines of Southwick’s pandemic response.
Fitzgerald retired in October 2019, and finally separated from the position the following January after a transition period of helping incoming Health Director Tammy Spencer. At that point, there were rumblings of a virus spreading around China, but it hadn’t yet become a mainstream concern in America.
Neither Fitzgerald nor Spencer thought much, at the time, of what would come to be known as COVID-19. In relatively short order, however, it would come to dominate Spencer’s job – and now Fitzgerald’s.
“Depending on how you look at it, it might have been good timing for me to leave,” said Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald didn’t watch the pandemic unfold from the sidelines, by any means. During his retirement from his position in Southwick, he worked as a health agent in Granville, a much smaller community.
“We never had nearly the magnitude of issues everyone else had to deal with,” said Fitzgerald.
He said it was difficult to watch the pandemic unfold from outside of his previously leading healthcare role, but he had faith that his fellow health agents and officials across Massachusetts and the U.S. could deal with the pandemic effectively.
Fitzgerald now finds himself returning to his former role on a part-time interim basis after Spencer left to take a similar job in East Longmeadow. Though the vaccines have lessened the severity of COVID-19 cases and reduced deaths, the pandemic is still very much in the foreground of public health.
Now, in almost an echo of the decisions that needed to be made by Spencer and the Board of Health in the first weeks of the pandemic, Fitzgerald said that he will be having conversations with the board about mask mandates for certain indoor spaces. This time, however, local health departments will have less backing from the state to enforce any such mandates.
“What is different from last year is that we don’t have any emergency orders behind us,” said Fitzgerald.
Hampden County as a whole is facing a much faster pace of infection than what was reported at the same time in 2020, and Christmas and New Year’s gatherings are expected to accelerate the spread.
Hampden County, including Southwick, has a much lower vaccination rate than the rest of the state, which Fitzgerald believes may be a difficult hurdle to overcome at this stage.
Fitzgerald also said that he finds this wave of infections to be troubling for that reason, as well as the omicron variant, which is believed to be far more infectious than the delta variant, which is still the dominant variant in the country today.
He has said that he will remain in the interim role for as long as is necessary, especially considering the difficulty the Board of Health has been having finding a new permanent director. Across the country, medical professionals are in short supply, largely due to fatigue and burnout from the pandemic. As a result, the Board of Health found it necessary to request a raise in salary for a new health director, to attempt to attract more qualified candidates.