Board of Health: January 26, 2021

Transcript machine-generated with Whisper speech recognition (the source video has no caption track). No speaker labels; proper names and dollar figures occasionally misheard. Click any timecode to jump to that moment in the source video.

0:00 Good evening, everybody. Our only agenda item is the COVID update, and before we get to Andrew’s report, I want to open our report with a discussion on pool testing in the schools, which has been a hot topic lately. Because we discussed this at length at our last meeting last week, and there was opportunity for public participation, there will not be public participation tonight regarding pool therapy. I mean, pool testing, sorry. After I make my statement, Helene and Michelle, go ahead. I was going to make a few statements that, because you did not get your minutes this week, I do have something to say about the reopening meeting, so that’s the problem. We can get to that. So I just was saying that after I make the statement, I want to open up a discussion between you two, but we’re not going to open up to the public tonight. Regarding pool testing, we can get to the public later on in the meeting about other issues, if there’s anybody who has anything to ask about or comment on. So in the last week, I have attended a DESI webinar on pool testing at the invitation of Dr. Becky. I’ve spoken to the head school nurse, Dan McMahon, and also Sarah Gold, the chair of the school committee, among others. I have come to the decision that this is not our decision to make about pool testing. This is the school’s decision to make. We should not weigh in because we can’t be allocating the school’s resources or spending the school’s money.

1:35 The pilot program for pool testing comes through DESI, not the Department of Public Health. So I made my decision based on my own research, and I see pool testing as one tool in the toolbox. It is not the be all end all, and it will not solve COVID in the schools. There’s been very little spread in the schools, aside from sports, and that’s a different issue that we can discuss at another time. But the six-feet distancing and other protocols in the schools have been working. So if the schools decide to go forward with the six-week pilot for pool testing that’s allowed by DESI, that is their prerogative. And there are some clear advantages, and there are some obvious disadvantages to pool testing. And I would suggest that we neither recommend nor oppose this school initiative. So that’s my two cents. And I imagine that you both want to say something as well. Either you. Want to go ahead, Michelle? Yeah, sorry. I’m trying to get my AirPods to work, and they’re not. Hold on. Hello, hello. All right. I give up on those. Can you guys hear me? Yes. So I also listened to a recording, I think, of the same DESI webinar. Was it the January 13th DESI webinar? It was last Friday. It was actually a live webinar. I don’t know. I was not able to attend that one. So I listened to a DESI webinar. I’m not sure if it was the exact same one.

3:10 And while I do agree that this is not our decision to make, I do believe that it is our responsibility as the Board of Health to weigh in on it. And I, of course, have not sat in as Helene has on conversations. And my only conversations with Deanna have been during our last board meeting. But I have to say, from attending the webinar and getting more information, it did make me feel more open to the idea of pool testing rather than less open to the idea. What I felt kind of encouraged by was, first of all, DESI’s, you know, you said that DESI is, you know, that it’s being run by DESI and not the Department of Public Health. There were public health folks on, you know, on the webinar participating in the webinar. It’s very much of a partnership. It’s not just being run by DESI. What I heard was a real commitment to making things really work for the schools, not leaving schools in the lurch, helping them figure out how to find resources.

4:49 Obviously, we don’t know what kind of stimulus funds are coming down the pike. So that’s a big question. But really wanting to help with not just, you know, they said we know school system necessarily have the, you know, the personnel to handle this. We want to be there to help schools figure this out. We know there’s only been a couple of schools that have done this. And what I heard was a lot more commitment to helping schools figure this out than I had previously understood. So I felt much more encouraged. And what I also heard was, you know, and I heard just from talking to Helene, you know, I understood from Dr. Bucky that there were ideas of doing it in, you know, maybe starting in one, doing it in one school or two schools and not in all schools. And I heard that DESI was open to that so that there’s the possibility of doing it just in the high school or just in the middle in the high school. So that flexibility also made me more open to the idea of this happening. And then the other thing I also heard was now the six week pilot is obviously the way to go because of the funding, but that there are opportunities to opt into the state contracting and, you know, participate even if, you know, even if you’re not doing the six week pilot, which, you know, if stimulus funding were available, you know, kind of

6:27 could be an option. Now, obviously, you know, the Board of Health is not on the ground in the schools. We have capacity issues. But the thing that I just want to point out from what you said is regarding not that many cases in the schools. And yes, that is the case. But I think the rationale for doing the pool testing is not solely because of cases in the school. It is not that many cases in the schools. It is as a tool in the toolbox regarding community spread. And I believe that, and I’ve talked to Andrew about this, that we certainly need to, as a community, be putting our efforts towards the vaccine right now. And I don’t want to take efforts away from that. And I also, and I will bring this up later in the meeting, need to be thinking about extra efforts around, you know, ramping it up around mask wearing. So I believe those are other tools we really need to be focused on. But I am not, I am not convinced that the pool testing, we should be closing the door on the pool testing. So while I know it’s not necessarily our decision to make, I don’t know, I am just, I feel like this is a resource that is being offered by, that we have at hand. And I’m just not convinced that this is, that there aren’t ways to make this work. And I don’t know, I just am not as convinced as you are, Todd, that this couldn’t be a possibility

8:16 that could help. Well, I didn’t, I didn’t say that specifically. I more said that because it’s a DESI initiative, this is really not our decision. And, and, you know, if the school decides to do it fine, if the school decides not to do it fine. But I truly believe, after doing my due diligence, that it’s not our decision. And, and, okay, but if it’s not our decision, we should still be making our recommendation of whether we think it is a valuable tool in the toolbox. So that is, that is where we stand as the Board of Health. So I guess what I’m saying is from my Board of Health perspective, from everything I’ve heard, and the way it’s being presented to the communities is, I think it would be a valuable tool in the toolbox. And I’m more convinced that DESI and the partners working with DESI are trying to, you know, make it work for the partnering communities by, you know, allowing flexibility, offering resources. So if there’s a way that our school system can make it work, I would encourage them to, to try and do it. If it’s absolutely impossible, and it’s going to make it so difficult to do the other matters at hand.

9:48 Well, of course, that is a decision of the school system. And by no means would I think that, you know, we should get in the way of that decision making. But as a tool for, for getting more information around how we stop community spread, as our public health decision making hats on, I think it’s one more important tool. And do you have anything, Todd? Do I? Of course. Have you ever known me not to add something? I, first of all, I didn’t realize that there was a webinar to see. I did speak with Andrew after speaking with you. I did not get it. Andrew sent me a synopsis of the pool testing, which most of the information was, was what I’ve been hearing at the last two reopening committee meetings. It was very helpful to see it in print. But I would like to see that webinar, if you could forward it to me, Todd. I think we all should be on the same page. I didn’t realize that. Well, to clarify, there was the, the superintendent invited me as chair to get extra information. It wasn’t, it wasn’t something that you were being excluded from. It was, that I was being. I think we all have to be on the same page and we should have all gotten it. And I’d like to see it. So that would be, and that’s up to you as the chair to disseminate that information. It was a live thing. I don’t have a link to it. So I don’t know if that’s out there as a recording, but we can find that out. All right. I just sent you something.

11:20 I thank you. I’ll look at that later on. But, and I do think that the Board of Health should be an advisory committee to the, to the school committee. I think this, to the, to the school department and the school committee, especially to the superintendent. He’s been very collaborative with us and I’m sitting on that reopening committee so that there is a give and take. And it’s not just for my ears and for me to absorb it and leave it there. It’s for me to pass it on to my board. And I think that we should discuss it in, in whatever topic is of importance. And I think that we do a great service to the community and to the superintendent by having these discussions and thank you for bringing this one up. But the last two reopening committee meetings have been. Well, we’re not talking about those right now, Helene. And so at the last two reopening committee meetings, most of the conversation has been around, around pool testing. And so my information is what I have gotten from them. And it seems that Dr. Bucky is doing a tremendous amount of work in treating us very seriously by looking at all avenues of this, of this program. And he did offer something that that would be a little bit different from, from the regular six week pool testing and Michelle touched on that about doing it throughout different grades for a three week period.

13:04 And he so he has a good. He has something that is a good alternative if he if they do choose to do it. From my, the information I’ve gotten, I do not feel that we, it’s necessary to go to pool testing. If the school department in the superintendent decide to do that, there’s, there is a dollar amount involved that they need to think about the right now the lead nurse, Deanna really isn’t on board with it for a lot of reasons. And I have to listen to her because she’s the one that said more research than I have. So she is influencing my, my thought process. And we found out last week there are only 41 students since last March that have been infected in the schools. And I feel that if people, as I said last week, do the right thing with a masks, keep their six foot distance do not do not socializing in homes outside of their own families. I think that we would continue to see not many more than the 41 students infected. And for all the money, the time, it’s a tremendous amount of time, the staff. That was one thing that I also read in the synopsis of it does state, this is Dessie, but that there is to be trained staff. And I had heard at last meeting, there were a lot of people that were volunteering as volunteers. I don’t know what kind of training they’re talking about, or whether they need to be corried or sorried or things like that.

14:45 Those are all things that would, you know, influence a decision that I would that I would make. So at this point, I’m still listening. And I think that it’s good to have this discussion, because as I said, I really think that that the community and other people in the school department are looking to us for our input. And I think that’s all I have to say right now. Thank you. Andrew, do you have anything you’d like to add or say? No, not at this time. Okay. Yes, Michelle. Yeah, I just wonder, are we going to get me, I mean, through the minutes or from Dr. Fuckey or from the school committee members, are we going to get any updates on where this all has landed because I feel like those conversations are happening over there. Your Elaine may be privy to that, you may be privy to that, but I feel like I don’t know what’s going on. So, again, if they come up with a decision at the reopening committee meeting, you’ll certainly hear about it. Yeah. And I would be the first one to let you know. Okay. So I also hope that when we do get the minutes that if you have any questions about them, that you can ask me and that’s what I would like to say as far as reopening committee.

16:24 It seems that we were taking up a lot of time with the reopening committee report, and it’s going to be a much easier way to handle it if our board reads the minutes, and then has questions as opposed to spending half hour to 45 minutes on them. And because you didn’t get the minutes this time, most of the meeting was spent on the pool testing and. And so, Colleen to cut you off, but I think that the hope was to not even give any report until the minutes have been released. Well, I had made that decision with Andrew that I was not going to give a report because we’re going to get minutes and we don’t have the minutes yet. So we’ll wait till next week to discuss those minutes once they’re out. Well, I’m not going to discuss them. It’s just saying that most of the meeting was about the pool testing. And if I I’d like to finish and I’ve been working very hard with the reopening committee and I’d like you to know that when the minutes come, I will start reporting. Okay. I’m feeling confused. So I understand that when we have the minutes, that is our path to and I agree with that that we have the minutes. So you will not be making the oral report on this meeting, but we don’t have minutes right now. I said I would, but I did. I told you most of it. And if after Andrew’s report, when I usually give the reopening, I will see if there’s anything else that I feel it’s important to share with you.

18:04 So as far as the pool testing, I think that we don’t need to take a vote because there’s nothing. Yeah. So we can just we can just move on. We’ve we’ve made our opinions clear. I Dr. Bucky, this is your decision. And we all know that if it happens and there’s issues, of course, we are collaborative between departments. But we don’t want to be the ones to tell you to do it or not to do it. I think that is the majority opinion. Well, both Michelle and I said we would like to act as advisory if he has questions to come back to Andrew, which is the board or any one of us. Yeah. And I think but, you know, to make it clear that I but I think you did hear some different opinions from us. I think you heard a stronger opinion from me about its value and and and more from the perspective of its value in terms of limiting community spread less concern from Helene there. So, yeah, you’re not we’re not taking a vote. So we’re not looking for consensus here. But and I think, you know, and it. Yeah. So but to just take that into consideration that from the Board of Health, there is some some some concern or some suggest some suggestions from the Board of Health to just at least keep in mind that are

19:48 you know, some of us are interested in seeing you do this from not just the perspective of spread within the schools but for community spread but also do understand your limitations but are also here to help figure out and strategize how to make how to make things possible. Should you need help? Andrew, should we move on? Case report. So obviously this case report came out on Friday, January 22nd at that time. And I just want to make sure everybody understands that we run the numbers for this case report on Thursday morning at 10 o’clock. That gives us time to put everything together to have the graphs created. And as we gather all the information, we were able to release that Friday morning. So this case report came out Friday, January 22nd. At that time, we had 919 total cases. January 15th, the case count was 863. On January 8th, the case count was 789. So on Thursday, when we ran the report, we had 72 active cases. We had 31 confirmed deaths. I did receive a new updated death certificate from the town clerk this afternoon. So I will be going through that and just making sure that there are any new cases that I will be adding to that. And you’ll see that this Friday.

21:23 As far as the age groups goes, we are still seeing a higher numbers in the lower ages. So zero to 19, we had 27 cases. 20 to 29, we had 28 cases. 30 to 39, we had 10 cases. 40 to 49, we had 14 cases. 50 to 59, we had 20 cases. 60 to 69, 13 cases. 70 to 79, 9 cases. And 80 plus, we had 9 cases. So obviously right now, we’re seeing a lot of cases in those two younger age groups. And when we look at the data, that 50 to 59 group is also high. Most likely, these are parents of those lower age groups. And that’s why they’re contributing to these numbers. We are seeing cases once they get into the homes. It does take a little while, but it is reaching everybody at this point. Kind of regardless of you kind of separate out, so once it gets into a home, it’s very hard to stay away from it. So if it does come into your household, please take extra precautions. Ask the individual to wear a mask in the home. Obviously, we’re asking them to try to use a separate bathroom. That’s a big piece of it. But we are seeing a lot of spread within the homes. The average daily incident rate per 100,000 people last week went down slightly to 54.8 total tests. So they actually tracked the total tests from the beginning to now. So Marblehead residents have contributed to 29,055 tests over the last 14 days.

22:57 It was 4,098. That’s approximately 20% of the population has been tested in the last 14 days. The percent positive for the last 14 days was 4.25%. And that is a lower change. So we and that brings us down below that 5%, which is the red. And so we turned back into a yellow community. Again, we released visual data, average daily test case rate, percent positive total cases to date. And this week we also included new cases per the age groups. So it’s slightly different way to look at it. But it also gives you a very good visualization of who’s kind of contributing to a lot of the cases. Social gatherings continue to contribute to these increases. Transmission is occurring in homes as well as in the workplace. Obviously, please remember all persons over the age of five must be wearing a mask indoors and outside if you’re outside of your home. Hospitalizations has been a lot of discussion, really dictating where are COVID measures going. We are still seeing a lot of hospitalizations in the Northeast as well as across the Commonwealth. So we will continue to pay attention to this. The governor did release some orders. So we had a stay at home order from the hours to 10 to 5. We had, you know, obviously don’t have gatherings in your household, comply with the governor’s orders. But some of these that were effective are now released or rescinded.

24:35 So please stay up to date with all the governor’s orders on mass.gov. Obviously effective January 25th at 5 a.m. The mandatory early closure of businesses order requiring certain businesses to close by 9.30 p.m. will be rescinded. So that just took place on Monday, January 25th at 5 a.m. The following business activities listed below may operate past 9.30 p.m. Restaurants, arcades and other indoor and outdoor recreation, phase three step one businesses only, indoor and outdoor events, movie theaters and outdoor performance venues, drive-in movie theaters, youth and adult amateur sports activities, golf facilities, recreational boating and boating businesses, E.G. charter boats, outdoor recreational experiences, casinos and horse tracks, simulcast facilities, driving and flight schools, zoos, botanical gardens, wildlife reserves, nature centers, close contact personal services, hair and nail salons. So all these are allowed to operate past 9.30. Museums, cultural and historical facilities, gyms, fitness centers and health clubs, indoor and outdoor pools. Gatherings may go, like I said, beyond 9.30. Again, we still have a travel advisory in place for the state of Massachusetts. All travelers arriving to Massachusetts, including returning residents who do not meet an exemption, are required to self-quarantine for 10 days or produce a negative COVID-19 test result,

26:07 except travelers from Hawaii. If you have had close contact with the person who has been diagnosed with COVID-19, get tested, self-quarantine, stay home and monitor your health for symptoms of COVID-19 for 14 days. Obviously, this is the generic information coming from the state. You can test out a quarantine, you know, so all that stuff still applies. So if you’re interested in traveling, make sure there’s a travel format you still need to fill out. So go to mascot.gov and click on the traveling. Learn where you will fit into the COVID-19 vaccination distribution line. So we are currently vaccinating Phase 1 people. We’ve opened that up to home-based healthcare workers. Today, we vaccinated congregate care facilities and settings, and they’re also opening up to healthcare workers that are non-COVID facing. So at this point, all of Phase 1 is open. We did have a clinic today in Salem, which is accessible to Marblehead residents, and we will have a clinic on Thursday, which is also accessible to Marblehead residents. Phase 2 is scheduled to begin February 1st. Now, we’ve had a lot of discussion with the state over the last couple days. You’ve seen a lot of national news over the limited supply of vaccine at this point. So we have been told that we are to expect limited vaccine. So yes, this does cause some concern, but we don’t have any choice in this. I can only get the state a lot to us.

27:42 We have been told that we could expect for a period of time, maybe up to one month, that we will only receive 100 doses a week. So that is going to limit our vaccination clinics at this point. But please go into mass.gov, COVID vaccinations, and that will describe more and more activity. There’s different websites to take a look at. Yes, we are being inundated with phone calls. When can I get vaccinated? How can I get signed up? We are releasing press releases for different groups at different times, letting them know that they can now go online and sign up. If you sign up, obviously there’s a form that you have to fill out testifying that you fit into those categories. So please pay attention to all this stuff. We want to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible, but we currently do not have as much vaccine as we would like. So obviously there’s always additional information on mass.gov. There’s the weekly health report that we pull a lot of data from. This comes out on Thursday. It’s actually pulled data from Wednesday. This gives us the percent positive, the average daily rates, the total test, the total test for the last 14 days. We also have, you can see the positive COVID cases in school from the DESI website. You can get other information. So obviously there’s a lot of information from 211. There’s also live chat for non-emergency questions and help.

29:16 We want to make sure that people have information regarding mental health. Mental health issues, like we talked about before, is very high concern at all times. So there’s a crisis counseling assist program, 888-215-4920. If anything, you can always email the governor’s office or call about abuse and assault, 617-725-4005. There’s a lot of information on domestic violence and sexual assault. We want to make sure this information is available to you, and you can go to our town website and find this information as well as going to the state website. There’s download state-of-the-way flyers, the national call…

30:30 And so people really need to be patient. I know it’s really hard, but that’s kind of where we are right now. We are trying to hold clinics in Salem two days a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As long as we have vaccine, we will continue to do that. Any questions on the case report? A question? Yes. Actually, two related questions. Will the lack of the amount of vaccine affect the second vaccines for the people that you’ve given already? No. So we want to make sure that we can give the second dose to everybody that has received the first dose. So we will make sure that if you have been vaccinated, PrepMod will email you again to remind you of when you’re supposed to be vaccinated. It’s also written on your card if you came to the Marblehead Clinic or the Beverly Clinic for the first responders or other people like that. I do want to remind people on the case count, you need to read the fine print. When I do the ages, that’s based on a 14-day period, not just a seven-day period. And that data is from, so this past one was from 1-7 to 1-21. So I just want to make sure people kind of understand how the math works for adding up the cases. The other question about the doses, what are they doing about the ones that people aren’t using at the nursing homes and the hospitals and the prisons? I understand there’s a lot left over there.

32:00 So obviously, the state has a total allocation. They know exactly where the doses went to. If they’re not being used, they’re being collected by a courier service and being brought back into the pool and people can request those and those are being pushed out also. So no doses should be wasted. Anytime we’re having clinics, if we have leftover doses that have been drawn out into vials, we have phone numbers of people that we’re supposed to contact to come quickly to get these doses. Obviously, we don’t want any doses wasted. Another question about our community, which you’ve been talking about, mental health and all, what food insecurity is that our food pantry? Is that up to speed? I know they had a drive on Sunday. The Democratic Town Committee did that. So the Democratic Town Committee had their own food drive. We have a food pantry in town. We have several food pantries in town. They received quite a bit of food. The school department is continuing on with their meal services. So you can sign up to get a meal. Yes, there’s a lot of money that has been allocated in the state to deal with food insecurities. So if you have questions or issues, you can always reach out to the health department if you’re looking for phone numbers to reach your information on food securities. And could you give us an update on the restaurants, which are 25% indoors?

33:34 So they just, like I said, they have rescinded some of the orders. So currently, yes, restaurants are 25% capacity, but now restaurants can stay open later than the 930 mark. But you need to have food when you are ordering drinks. So we want to make sure that all restaurants are continuing to abide by this stuff. We do get reports at times and we will continue to do inspections. Thank you. The only other information on how to get vaccinated. So obviously, visit mass.gov slash COVID vaccine to find your phase and priority group. If you’re eligible, use mass.gov slash COVID vaccine map to find a vaccine clinic near you. The state is going to have to have is setting up potentially five, seven mega sites around the state. So there’s going to be one located in Danvers. There’s going to be one in Boston. There’s going to be one on the South Shore. They want, they’re going to prioritize those mega sites before they go to kind of these local clinics where we’re kind of filling in the blanks. So people need to remember that when they go onto these websites, don’t just look at Marvel head or the closest site to you. Look at other sites surrounding our community to see what is available. Now, yes, some might be private,

35:06 but a lot of them are going to be public so you can get into them and see what’s available. Please take a look at that. They actually have just changed. There’s a vaccine advisory committee that is looking at and people are being able to petition where they fall in the list. So they actually just redid phase two in order of priority. So currently we have individual 75 plus are at the very top of phase two. Next in line is individual 65 plus individuals with two plus comorbidities. Those that are increased risk for severe illness. After that comes early education, K through 12 workers, transit, grocery, utility, food and agricultural sanitization, public works and public health workers. And then after that individuals with one comorbidity. And then phase three is the general public. Like I said in the past, Johnson and Johnson is looking to seek an emergency authorization use. Our understanding is that’s going to be a one shot rather than the two shot from Pfizer and Moderna. So that is hopefully going to speed up the process, but there’s a lot of information that’s coming out quickly. And then obviously, depending on this vaccine shortage is going to really dictate the vaccine distribution timeline. But like I said, phase two is still scheduled to open on February 1st. So if you go to the megasite in Danvers for your first dose, do you assume that you go to the

36:39 exact same location for your second dose? Yes. It’s not going to switch around. It’s not going to switch around. So once you essentially go there and they have allocated a dose for you, the computer is going to remember that you got it there and they want you to go back. And so that’s how they’re doing all the allocations to keep track of everybody. Michelle? Sorry. Andrew, I will post the link to the medical core. You had mentioned that that was a I know community members are interested in making themselves available to volunteer, not just medical professionals, but that generally speaking, probably I’m guessing for some of these mega centers that and I know that there are various community members who are already starting to try and organize people. But the best way if people want to be available, even though the general public is and that’s when the most volunteers will be needed. And things aren’t necessarily ramping up at that level yet. But the best way people can get ready to volunteers to go on to that medical core and put their applications in so that they can get Corey, you know, do their Corey applications and everything, etc. Is that is that what you recommend? Yes. So we use two different organizations. So the MRC, the Medical Reserve Corps, we often use them as volunteers.

38:11 And yes, you do not have to be a medical person. It’s also mass response is the other website for people to sign up. Also, again, it’s not just medical people, even in our small clinics that we’ve had in the last couple of weeks, we are using Medical Reserve Corps members to, you know, add different people, we want to make sure that we have a large throughput as maximum, we want to be able to push through as many people that our sites can handle. So when we’re using the CoA or the gym over in the Salem State, we want to make sure that we’re maximizing the space. And so, yes, we’ll have four or five vaccination centers, stations, we have medical screeners that we need. So yes, we’re drawing from the Medical Reserve Corps all the time. We also have other positions, you know, greeters and movers and stuff like that runners. And so yes, you don’t have to be a Medical Reserve Corps or medical professional. But you do need to be a vetted volunteer for us to use you. Thank you. That the the extent of the report tonight? Yep, that is the extent of the report tonight at this point. So I think we need to talk about the budget briefly after that, right? But we do. Yeah, before we do, let me let me get to some there’s a couple of hands raised. So just want to add a few things about the meeting, the reopening meetings, since we don’t have the minutes, I think that we need to, to skip that till next week. And I think that they want to

39:44 not have anything come out before the minutes or to let the minutes be the first thing that people hear of it. That wasn’t what was decided that that’s okay. There was a compliment that was given to our health director that I’d like to give that he got the ultraviolet disinfectant machines for the schools. And they were very appreciative. They thanked Andrew publicly, and takes 10 minutes of room and it’s been very effective. And it’s been saved a lot of time. Yeah, that was a technology that I was aware of through being a registered sanitarian. And obviously, we’re always looking at cost and manpower. And that is a newer technology. It’s actually old technology that has been revitalized. And so it was something that I really felt the schools could benefit from. They had been using a huge amount of manpower to clean those rooms. And we could use technology to reduce that time. And like you said, you can clean a room now in 10 minutes, you can clean very large spaces. Obviously, these units have safety precautions, because UVC light can be dangerous. But it’s got a motion sensor on it, it’s got a heat sensor on it. And so it’s got technology that’s protecting everybody. Once you’re out of the room, you can look at it through the glass, and you’re not going to be haunted anyway. But yeah, that’s technology that I wanted to bring into the school system to really try and help them out to deal with trying to have a clean environment, but trying to reduce their costs. Well, it was very much appreciated.

41:21 So before, yes, Michelle? Well, I just have a question in terms of order of when I should raise my, I want to discuss masks, and I don’t know when during the meeting to discuss it. Why don’t we do that now? And then we’ll get public comment, and then we’ll go to the budget. Although, I’m wondering if maybe we should do the public comments, because they might be more relevant to the report. So I don’t know. Why don’t we hear what people have to say? I don’t want to lose the thread. And I’ll go in the order of hands raised, but in case anybody came in late, please remember that we are not doing any public comment related to pool testing tonight. So Katie Martin, you’re first. Thank you. So I guess I was looking for a little bit of clarification on the numbers in the report from Ms. Heslett. She said that there were 41 cases in the school since March, yet tonight we’re reporting 27 from zero to 19. So I guess I’m just curious, like on the clarification on that number, because I do believe we were in the 20s last week for zero to 19 as well. And the previous week, we were, you know, above 10. And I’m just trying to understand how we have this 41 person number in our schools, yet every week the zero to 19 number seems to be

42:55 in the double digits first and second. In terms of, I heard that you weren’t going to take comment on the pool testing. And I understand that, that kind of sets the DESI program. And that’s not in your wheelhouse, but the part of the comment where there’s a testing program now being thrown out that wouldn’t be DESI that I’m understanding that would be three weeks with three random grades. And that board of health members were sitting through a meeting where, you know, they’re putting this different kind of testing forward that sounds like it’s not out of your wheelhouse, because it wouldn’t be the exact standards to which DESI is looking at. And sounds like it wouldn’t be random, but kind of prescribed. I’m wondering if there’s comments on that tonight.

43:54 I guess one of the questions was addressed to me. Those were the numbers that were given to me at the reopening committee by the lead nurse. She went through the numbers right on her computer. And those were the ones that were, have been counted as spread in the school at the time. And that was last week. The other, uh, Okay. That’s okay. So clarification that spread in the school, that’s not positive cases of kids who are just attending school, but not necessarily also been told that there was, there’s been no spread of the school. So, so let me just clarify that for a minute. So we get a, DESI puts out their own report of cases of students in the school system. So they release a number. The numbers that I release are community wide. So zero to 19 is the age group that I get from the state that, you know, so, but that doesn’t mean that they go to marble, marble head public schools or they’re part of the DESI system. Do you have any clarifying? For both of us. Yep. So, you know, you could be 15 and you know, you’re not in the DESI, you know, you’re not in public school. You could be 15, but you go to private school. You could be five, you could be four, you know, so yeah, you’re looking at two different numbers. So I’m giving the total number of cases per that age group. And that’s for a two week period. So you can have some overlap. Remember that. And then DESI is just public school system. Thank you. As far as the program for the

45:32 three weeks, you’d have to speak to Dr. Bucky. I think he was trying to be creative, both in reaching the most, the most amount of students and spending the least amount of money is my thought process. Otherwise, I think you’ll have to write him an email. He’ll be answer you right away. I know that from experience. Sandra, good evening. My question is about clinics. Andrew, can you just clarify? You had mentioned a hundred doses. Was that a hundred doses assigned to them per week for those two clinics that you mentioned? No. So we have received doses for these clinics. So we had a first responders clinic. I don’t remember the dates at this point, you know, earlier on in January, we had clinics this week for congregate care and we’ll have a clinic on Thursday that we’re opening it up to all of phase one. Those clinics are in Salem at the Salem state. We already have the doses for those clinics. We don’t schedule the clinics unless we have the doses, but moving forward, we were informed by the state today that moving forward, they might only be able to allot us a hundred doses per week. And so that’s what I understood. And that’s it. That’s a clinic that we share with Beverly residents. Is that correct? Or is that Salem? Nope. So we have a five town coalition that is hosting these clinics currently. So it started with the first responders and it’s Swamp Scott,

47:04 Marblehead, Salem, Danvers and Beverly. And that’s open to all those residents, correct? So those were first responders. You know, for going forward for these next hundred that are being assigned. No, it’s going to be changing to tell you the truth. So this week, those clinics were open to those five communities for congregate care today. And then on Thursday, all those five communities for the, everybody, anybody in phase one. Now we are continuing to have conversations with the mayors and the town administrators of all those communities because everybody wants to have a clinic in their town. We only have so many resources. The state really wants public health only to really fill in gaps and not be creating a mega sites. The states want to have, you know, create the mega sites and dictate where they are. So there are spread out evenly across the state and they want to prioritize the vaccine going to the mega sites. And so they’re slowly kind of not cutting us off, but reducing what we can ask for. I can ask for as many people as I could essentially get, I could say, well, I know I can get 200 people per day per clinic. I need a thousand doses for this week. We do not believe that will be able to happen going forward. Hopefully it’s a short period of time, but we do not have an end date for when they’re going to start to ease up on that stuff. So those hundreds that we get assigned, I guess the clarification was it’s not a hundred for Marblehead residents. It’s a hundred for that particular

48:38 clinic that might be open to multiple communities, right? Yeah. And hopefully that we can kind of persuade them to say, let’s, let’s get a little bit more. Can we do a hundred for Marblehead? You know, we’re doing a regional clinic with Salem, Marblehead and Swamscott. Can we get 300 doses? Are you going to still limit us to the 100? But this is all new information that we, you know, we’ll continue to talk to the state about, but it’s unknown at, you know, unsure at this point. So that was one question. The second question is how are you guys doing when you get obviously present a license? It’s quite clear that you’re over 65 or 75, but how are you guys addressing the co-morbidities? Are they having to bring medical documentation? I know that you said there’s an attachment that they fill out, but is that on good faith when they fill that out online? Okay. That’s what I was wondering. Yep. And then that was just brought to our attention today. So we all had the same question as you. Now, we’re going to need a doctor’s prescriptions to get, say you have two co-morbidities. They said really the easiest thing to do is just have this attestation and we’re relying on people being honest. But people, people who are on blood thinners do need a note saying that they are cleared for the shot. Is that correct? That is correct. So, you know, yes, when you go through, we’re using PrEP mod and so there’s a whole bunch of questions that you have to answer. And unfortunately, some of the questions are, are you on blood thinners? We were unable to give out vaccine to people on blood thinners unless they had the doctor’s note. So we’re trying to make sure that they revise PrEP mod a little bit to capture some of the stuff. So people don’t get

50:13 all the way to the clinic. See, I’m here. We go through the preregistration with them and say, I have to exclude you because you don’t have this doctor’s note. So we’re working with the state to have some minor changes made to PrEP mod. Then my last question, I’m a little, it’s a loaded question and I think I’m just going to ask first, when the schools supply flu vaccine to the students, is that something that you guys initiate and you guys get asked for approval or is that something separate from school? No. So we don’t supply flu vaccine to the school. So we hold our own clinics with our vaccine that we allocate from the state. And we invite the students to come, but it’s done through us. It’s not done through the school. Okay. Because then that was going to be my second question is phase two, when we go to essential workers, that clearly opens up a whole bigger population. How the towns are going to address that with essential workers and teachers? Because that all of a sudden quadruples the amount of people that now need to get vaccinated. So that’s what I was just curious about. That’s an enormous group. When you look start to really think about it, even the healthcare workers non-COVID facing is a pretty large group in itself. Obviously that’s all the dentists, anybody that’s working in the healthcare industry, it could be all the way down to the janitor and stuff like that, that’s working in a hospital. But yes, that early education, the public works group, that’s a huge group in itself.

51:47 So there’s no most, so it’ll come down to still like the individual people finding clinics. There won’t be anything initiated from the, well, other than the limited vaccine, the board of health will have, there will be no priority to those certain groups where all the teachers will get vaccinated. And like I said, that was, like I said, you answered that as soon as you answered how the flu vaccine was. So I knew what the response was going to be. The idea is to have multiple locations where people can go. So we’re not all trying to go the same location. So you’re going to have mega sites, you’re going to have CVS and Walgreens, you’re going to have small clinics. We want to get this out there as quickly as possible, as long as we have the vaccine. And we’re trying not, I can’t stand there and check IDs over and over and argue with people. We want shots in the arm and we want people vaccinated. No, I totally agree. Thanks for your questions. Elizabeth Eisner, next question, please. Hi, thank you so much. I just wanted to, Michelle, you touched on this, but I just wanted to emphasize last week, we had, there were a number of people on the call that were offering to volunteer. And then we were told about a site, I found it, I can’t remember the name of it, but Michelle mentioned it, where folks could go and like register to be volunteers. And then the plan was to really get that out to folks. I would just encourage the board to put that on the Marblehead Town website, where right now there’s not really updated, accurate information

53:21 about volunteering in COVID, add it to your Facebook page, put it on the weekly report. I think that this town has a bunch of people that are really hungry to volunteer and help. And I would just really encourage you to take advantage of those folks and make sure that they have the information in hand so that when we get to the point that Andrew and his team and others need to call on these volunteers, they’re like ready to go. So I believe that the town’s website should have been updated last Wednesday with the MRC information where you could go on, go to the MRC website and sign up. But we are already using volunteers. I couldn’t find it and I go to the town’s website quite a lot. So I would ask that you just take another look. I also looked for it in the weekly report and didn’t see it there. And I didn’t see it on the Board of Health website. So I’m relatively technically savvy and I couldn’t find that site. And so I would just encourage you to take a quick look and just get it out there to folks that might even be less technically savvy than I am. And I’ll just say, I agree with you. I help coordinate our Facebook page and I will put that info on the Facebook page. The reason I didn’t post it there yet is I was just trying to gather some information because I was getting some information about some other efforts to coordinate

54:55 volunteers and wanted to make sure that I was gathering all of the right information to send people to. And I did confirm with Andrew that right now those two sites that he did mention were the best too. There may be some additional places that we might want to send people to, but right now those are the two best ones. So I agree with you that it can be a little bit of a, I often find myself having a hard time finding things on our various sites myself. But I will certainly put it on the Facebook page. And as easy as we can make it for people to find things, especially if people have to go through the quarry process and everything, we want people to get all of those ducks in a row sooner rather than later so that when we hit our next phase when the public is ready to go, we have all those volunteers lined up. Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks. Good evening, Deanna. I just wanted to do the clarification on the numbers from Marblehead Public Schools because I have that information. I don’t know if you want me to tell people what the numbers are from Marblehead Public Schools for positives. Please, yeah, go ahead. So the positive student population, and we are only calculating since September 14th when we started school, there have been 42 positive students. There have been 22

56:28 positive staff. And we’ve calculated four remote students. We don’t follow remote because like Desi, we’re only looking at students in the buildings and staff in the buildings because they would have the potential to have school transmission. So the number is 68 positives across the board from September until now. Thank you, dear. Yeah, and no school transmission. Sorry for the misinformation. No worries. Thanks for the update. Sarah. Yes, so my question is about the clinics. And I noted that Andrew had pointed out that if you go to the clinic at Salem State, that’s where you should be going for your second dose and so on and so forth. My question really is where, for instance, say people might have signed up for the clinic for tomorrow and are phase one people and then should get their next shot and I believe in 28 days. You know, 28 days fast forward, we’re into a much bigger population jockeying for those same, you know, 100, 200 spots. How if the people getting it in phase one that got it there really need to go back to that site and that’s their only available option. How are we securing that those spots, if they’re limited, are going to people who need to get that second shot in a timely manner versus someone who’s up finally in phase two for their first shot because I think

58:01 it’s going to be really important to make sure that we can give those second shots if needed. The state is tracking all that and making sure that they are keeping allocations for the first, you know, people that get the first dose need that second dose within, you know, after 28 days. So the state is tracking all that stuff and holding that supply for us so we can do that second shot. Well, it’s a piggyback on the end. I can’t supply but like when you go on to sign up there’s not a different sign up page for the shot two piece versus the shot one person. No, so to get your second shot so the program will automatically email you to remind you that you need to go back to where you were to get your second dose. So will there be people in the same site at the same time someone getting their first shots and getting their second or will there separate events? It is possible that you can have people getting first shot and second shot at the same site. Yeah, I’m just saying with the booking the way it is answered like today when from the time it opened it booked up in an hour and 20 minutes. So it’s all people that are in phase two that are booking them up. Those phase one people that are due for the shot don’t even have a chance because all the slots are taken with phase two. So we know exactly who has to get the second dose on that day. So we might not even be able to open it up to other people and on that day it might be a closed clinic to people just getting your second dose. Oh depending on the number of

59:32 people that will be serving that time. You’ll send that link directly to just those people won’t be there. That’s correct. But you’re not currently giving to phase two people like Sarah saying. No that phase two is open on February 1st. Or were you meaning phase two by shot two? No phase two opens February 1st. Right but I think not phase two but shot two. It doesn’t matter we’re So finally, Jody, good evening. Hello, I just wanted to give a shout out that the information is on the town website. If you go to the homepage, there’s a giant fluorescent red banner saying COVID information. And if you click on that, there’s a whole list of links, including the volunteer corps, the medical service corps. All of them just one click from the homepage on the website. That was it. Thank you. Okay, so since there’s no more raised hands, let’s move on to Michelle’s topic, please. Sure. Oh, and Jody, you just reminded me. I had like a really crazy few days and you just reminded me to post the mask articles. I’m so sorry. You sent it to me over the weekend and I was busy. So I will do that. You sent me all three. So I will post all of them. Jody did all the articles for the reporter on Mask Up and they’re all going to go up on the Facebook page as soon as I can.

1:01:08 So speaking of masks, oh, there’s something really weird popping. I didn’t get that. Could you try again? Is that Michelle? Yeah. That’s my AirPods talking to me. Sorry. Or EarPods, as I like to call them. Okay, so masks. I’m also masking up as the reporter article is showing. And I think we, I brought this up last week and I’m going to bring it up again. And Todd’s probably going to have a little debate with me. But I think we, I still do believe that we need to have some, some initiative that we push forward through the Board of Health around upping our game in town regarding masks that as the new variant kind of takes hold in the community. Okay, there’s something going, something with the AirPods that I need to, I don’t know what to do. There’s signaling some kind of theory situation and I don’t know how to stop it. We can still hear you. Okay, no, but somebody keeps popping up and it’s like talking to me. So if you’ve been following in the news, what’s going on in Europe, mandating, you know, filtration masks.

1:02:40 We do know that as Todd brought up last week, you know, that there are still concerns about, you know, medical professional availability, but there are some filtration masks that we know and many people within the public health community are arguing that if we are going to kind of win this race between vaccines and spread of this new variant that given where we are with vaccine distribution and that we’re going to need to do a better job of wearing masks and the way that we’re going to do that is to get more people wearing better masks and masks that protect the wearer of the mask and that might actually help convince more people to wear masks and protect those who are wearing them. And so given the fact that there is availability for, say, the KF-94 masks and KN-95 masks easily available on Amazon, cheaply available, I’m not, you know, I would say when we know what stimulus funds are available since we don’t have that information yet, I’m not going to suggest we think of anything that’s going on. I don’t think we have any kind of town-wide effort, but I think at the very least we could be doing a better job of some kind of educational effort where we really suggest that maybe not for kids who it’s hard to get it well fitting, but for older teens and adults when they’re out in public, maybe, you know, that they’re wearing, you know, when you’re going to the supermarket, when you’re on transportation,

1:04:34 that you’re wearing masks that are protecting you that are filtering. And, you know, I think that it would be like we’ve talked about a better tool in the toolbox for protecting our community for spread as this new variant takes hold. And I mean, we see it happening across Europe now. Germany is doing it. Lufthansa is doing it as an airline. All of the kind of, you know, public health professionals are saying that this is really what we would be doing if we had more access to these masks. And now there are some, maybe not the N95s, but the second level down. If not those filtration masks, then doubling masks or triple layer masks. So Tom’s shaking his head yes and no. So I’m going to ask him to say what his opinion is. But at least if you can be blowing out that candle, that’s not the best mask, right? So, and what I’m concerned about is we don’t want to discourage what we know is important, just the masks. Like I know we don’t want to be discouraging masks just in general, but here we are this many months into the pandemic. I don’t think we need to shy away from doing even better around masks. And it may be an incentive if people can get the message like this mask that you can cheaply order from Amazon.

1:06:15 And if we can give some suggestions around the ones that aren’t fake from China, get the Korean ones, then this may actually protect you too. That’s something that might actually encourage you to wear your mask. So that’s my pitch. I’m curious what Tom has to say, but I will leave that to the chair. Yeah, Tom, did you? Yeah. Well, yes, I agree that masks are going to be the most important thing even while we continue to vaccinate everybody’s been saying that. I think that the kind of the idea around the masks, our cloth masks are about 50 to 60% effective. Surgical masks are about 70% effective. If you then double those up, you get a, it works out to be 91% protective, whereas an N95 is obviously 95% protective. It’s a lot simpler than necessarily going and getting the Korean ones. Korean ones seem to be good. The other ones though, you really have to be suspicious about where they’re coming from and who’s manufacturing them. And if you order on Amazon, you have no idea. You will get something, but you don’t even know whether it’ll be any of those, to be honest, these days. And so I think the idea of especially encouraging double masking whenever you’re indoors, I think that’s, that is the biggest, you know, and that may be a way of doing it that you suggest indoor double masking.

1:07:56 Because that’s where we’re, you know, we either less airflow, etc. And people could very easily carry around a second mask for anytime, for example, shopping or anything like that. And they would be that much more protected. Do you think the surgical, like, if you have your cloth mask, surgical mask over the cloth mask or, you know, the other way around, the other way around the surgical mask with the cloth mask. I mean, if we were to, I don’t know if we want to go down this road, but I mean, there are some sites that have been vetted. But who knows if they change. I mean, I don’t, I don’t know. There are had there have been some sources that have been vetted as reputable and you know and you know that for you know paying 94s. Not all of them are rogue and, you know, for people who do want to go down that route. I don’t know. I, and I know a lot of, you know, these other countries are are suggesting that that’s the way to go. So, but I jump in for a sec. This was one question that was brought up at the reopening committee. They specifically asked that they were looking at the board of health looking toward the board of health for a double masking. And maybe we could put that on the agenda for next week because we’ll have the we will have their report. And if Andrew, if you could do some research on that because they are looking for some advice.

1:09:38 We take our guidance from the CDC and the World Health Organization. So when they state that we should be double masking, that’s what I’m going to recommend that we should be double masking. And you haven’t seen that yet. I have not gotten any information from them at this point, but we will continue to follow their websites. Well, let me just ask, let me just say that, I mean, with all due respect to the CDC, they are probably catching up with, you know, a situation that was not ideal for them. Public health wise for, you know, the past few years, right. So, I understand that that we want to take our guidance. But, you know, for the first time, the CDC is now like, you know, on TV issuing guidance around the pandemic. They haven’t been doing that over the past like nine months. They’re just now doing that. So, I’m not sure because and now, I mean, we have a whole, you know, new administration that’s just getting, you know, just getting on their feet to be able to do this. I’m not sure that this is something that we need to wait on if there’s enough evidence to be able to issue guidance on this. I don’t know. I’m not convinced that this is like such a difficult thing that we need to wait for the CDC on this.

1:11:28 Can I just jump in real quick? Sure, go ahead. Fauci has made an announcement saying that he highly recommends double masking. So if Fauci is telling us to do it, then the CDC, if they haven’t officially said it, it can’t be very far behind. Yeah. I believe he said it when you go indoors, not all the time. He said that if you’re in a crash. So we can we can we can mimic that message. We can echo that message. If that’s I thought I saw Deanna raising her hand. She just left. Maybe she meant to leave. That’s what I saw. So. So it seems like, I mean, we are messaging all along has been mask, mask, mask since since this started. There is definitely the trend is definitely going towards double masking indoors. I’ve seen that. I’m sure Andrew, the CDC is going to be saying that pretty soon. That’s that’s my prediction also. I also believe that double cloth mask is more effective than single cloth mask. So it’s a thicker service. I’m still reluctant. As Tom said, I believe that there are a lot of counterfeits out there. So just because you see it cheaper, at Home Depot Amazon, you don’t know what it is. And also the medical facilities are still desperately needing every mask they can get as far as I can tell.

1:13:01 The other thing is the masks are exceptionally good, good masks, good surgical medical masks are exceptionally expensive right now. You know, I used to buy masks regularly for say $10 for a box of 50 when you could get it. And now I’m spending up to as much as $50 for a box of 50. Some weeks it’s less, some weeks it’s more. You don’t know. But I think that if we tell people you have to have a medical mask underneath the cloth mask, the price alone, let alone the price alone is a prohibiting factor. But also the fact that the hospitals which are overrun and medical offices which are overrun need these masks more than the general public who can, I would assume, safely double mask with a non-medical mask. That’s not based on research I’ve done about double masking. That’s just my observations. Michelle, I appreciate all the work you’ve done and I appreciate the fact that you’re passionate about this. And I would like to just wait another week to see what it sounds like it’s going to come out. And I don’t think seven days is going to matter after we’ve been through almost a year of this. As I said last week, let’s get the people that aren’t wearing masks to wear masks first and let’s have people do what they’re supposed to be doing and not travel.

1:14:35 We’re coming up to February vacation and I’m sure people are making travel plans and we’re going to have another surge. Let’s just do the right thing. And that’s what I’ve been promoting. Doesn’t seem to work with everyone. Most of the people are wonderful and I have to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for doing what they’re doing. But the people that aren’t are causing others to have problems, be hospitalized and the rest. I’ll do a little bit more homework. Well, I don’t even think it’s your homework because I think you’ve done a lot of homework. I think our director is saying he’s waiting to get something and it seems like it’s coming down the pike. So we have been on the cutting edge of other things before as far as tobacco and plastic bags and other things. And you’ve been very helpful with that to get these things passed. So I’m listening to you very carefully, but I’m willing to wait a week. And we continue then. As soon as we have information from the CDC or World Health, we’ll post that online and make sure that gets pushed out through social media sites and all that. Well, I think that we should take a stand once that happens. We’ve done it before and we’ve really been very good about taking those positions in the past.

1:16:07 And I think we’ve been proud of our decisions. All right. So we will discuss this further once we have more information. The final item on our meeting tonight is to discuss the budget a little bit. Yes. Yes. So we have a new system. And on this system, we have to tell why we have to. Sorry, I just lost my zoom. There it is. We have to have goals, objectives, past accomplishments of the last year. I think this is going to be the most work the first year, but we have. And I don’t remember the date, but it’s been a couple of years. We set a list of goals. And I think that we can probably use them. They’re pretty, I mean, they’re not COVID pertinent, but they’re pretty universal goals for what the health department should be doing. We have our mission statement, which we need. And we voted on that a couple of years ago as well. Do we have those goals handy, Andrew? Yeah, we do. But you read the mission statement first. Yeah. So the mission statement is comes right from our annual report. The board of health promotes and protects the health, wellness and safety of the citizens of Marblehead while ensuring a clean and healthy environment. Sounds familiar. I don’t think we need to change that at all.

1:17:38 And then obviously, you know, the department description comes from essentially from the state. So, you know, in their recommendation, they said to list all the, you know, master of the laws. So these are all the laws and all the different subjects that we are in charge of. So it’s an enormous list, but these are all the things that we do. So that’s the second piece of it. You know, local boards of health, the Massachusetts are required by state statutes and regulations to perform many important crucial duties relative to the protection of public health, the control diseases, the promotion of sanitary living conditions and the protection of the environment from the damage of pollution. These requirements reflect the legislature’s understanding that many critical health problems are best handled by involvement of local community officials familiar with local conditions. So I listed all those different regulations and master of the law that go back to what we’re in charge of and what we need to enforce. So that’s the second piece. I did, you know, the organizational charts. It’s pretty simple. Obviously, it has the board of health at the top, then the director, and then we have our two departments, the health department and the waste department, and then the employees listed down through those both departments with Andrea actually in the middle who serves both those departments also. So that would be the organizational chart. And then as Todd said, this is a, if this first was implemented all under the selectments departments.

1:19:10 So it’s a little, when we, when we have to slide into it, we’re a little bit behind. So they have FY 20 accomplishments, you know, please provide a minimum of three to maximum of five. This could be a recap of the information submitted for annual report, or it could be simply work over order data certifications achieves projects completed, etc. Where possible reference a broader community goals such as a master plan or community guidelines, where applicable identify accomplishments that result in greater efficiency or increased levels of services to residents. So obviously through the board of health, we are required for many different things that we go out and we do an annual report. So I’m not sure how you guys want to kind of list our accomplishments and stuff like that. You know, you can take a look at the report. And then I do have our goals that we list, you know, that we came up with several years ago. So our goals are reducing waste and recycling more, finishing the transfer station, promoting a clean and healthy environment around the home, reduce mental health issues, develop adaptation strategies for town to reduce carbon emissions, continue program of vaccinations for flu, continue inspections of establishments that prepare and sell food and preventing obesity and promoting healthy eating. So, but we do need to kind of organize some of this stuff.

1:20:43 So we can, you know, be done with this piece of it. So, can we do some individual homework and have discussion on that next week? No, it’s due Friday. Unfortunately, Jason gave this to us. Yeah, Jason gave us to this last Wednesday or last Tuesday and gave us eight days to complete this. I just got it. And when I was originally given it to us, it was not, I was told that it wasn’t going to be due Friday, that our basic budgets were due Friday. And then he came out just the other day to say, these goals would be due also on Friday. We can push back, you know, I know Todd talked to Jason, but, you know, we can say, you’re not giving us enough time for the board to really think about this stuff. You know, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. He’s trying to do this extra stuff. It’s a little, you know, not really sure it’s the right time. If we’re doing, if it’s due on Friday, if we could get all the information that our thoughts to you on Friday, and then vote on it Tuesday, just tell them we have a meeting next Tuesday and we’ll get to him in final form. Well, I think that’s totally acceptable. I think that’s totally acceptable. You know, they’re slow to give us this information. You know, we don’t have a full financing department. So they’re, you know, they’re struggling to get information out to us in a proper amount of time. You know, this kind of came out of nowhere for a lot of us. And like I said, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. I’m concentrating more on daily cases, vaccination and issues around the pandemic. You know, to me, this is, you know, kind of a, you know, a lot of things that we’re doing.

1:22:31 But I would like to, we need to make a motion that we’ll have it into you by next Tuesday. And you’ll have it to them by Wednesday. No, I think you need to give me a draft and we can say, you know, we’re working on it and then we’ll have the final, you know, we’ll have the final for next Tuesday. On Wednesday, probably Wednesday, if I have a Wednesday. That’s gonna be it. So that’s way for us to weigh in, like just in track changes or how do you, how do you want us to do it? Probably really the best thing for you guys to do is to come up with your own accomplishments and then decide which ones you’re going to vote on. And obviously for FY20 accomplishments, you know, you’re gonna, you’re gonna think of the accomplishments that we’ve done this year and then the board is going to decide which the top five or three we’re going to put on paper. Obviously FY20 was mostly a pandemic year. Yeah. So, I mean, you can, there’s a lot of different accomplishments that you could say. You know, a lot of our normal, a lot of our normal projects were, were sidelined. Yes. And some of the accomplishments you can group together so you can still have, you know, a grouping of, if you say something about the pandemic you can put all the things that we did, you know, whether what we were doing, working with the town on the restaurants when you started and then working on the health and safety and working on the reopening and that’s all one, one topic.

1:24:21 So we can do that with a lot of the other things that we’ve done. And then FY21 obviously we didn’t have goals that we had set up for FY21, you know, FY21 started July 1st. So when I first saw this, I’m like, this is very outdated. But, you know, they’re looking for goals that, you know, and obviously same thing, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, the pandemic is not going to be over in FY21. It’s going to continue on. A lot of our goals are going to be around pandemic issues still. Yes, there’s other things that we’re doing all the time. You know, yes, we’re continuing to apply for grants from Master E.P. But the majority of our work really at this point is pandemic work. And yes, it accomplishes everything from restaurants to beaches to, you know, water quality and all that stuff. All the same things that we do on a regular basis, but during an emergency. Could you, you’ve sent us the mission statement, you’ve sent us the state laws, the regs. Could you, I don’t think I have the goals. It’s page eight. The goals. Okay. There’s generic goals listed there, you know, Main Street, sidewalk. It’s just an example. There’s no meaning. No, I’m talking about the ones that we made. Yeah, I can send those right out to you. I thought, you know, yep, we can get those right out to you. I mean, it probably, as you say, not relevant, but they’ll help us to, it’s a good worksheet. Oh, yeah.

1:25:51 But as far as like the budget goes, so we’ve been told level funded. So, but however, with that, we need to adjust our budget to deal with certain things. We need a full and vibrant, you know, board of health or health department. So I’m proposing to increase our public health nurses hours from 30 to 40 hours a week and increase our public health inspector from 30 to 40 hours. So both those positions would be, they’re currently full time, but there will be full, full time employees. And they might be like a 37 and a half hour work week compared, like, which is kind of what the office does, but I work extra to hit the 40 hours from the week. But so I would propose that those two get increased by at least seven and a half hours, if not the 10 hours. And then for the waste department, that’s the same thing. We are level funded for that. We are in the process of talking. So we have a 10 year contract with JRM. We are in year five. So we have another five years with that contract. We are in the last we’re about to go into our last year of contract with waste management. Waste management has approaches. They would like to continue our contract like they have done forever with you guys. So we are looking at numbers. They have sent me a proposal that I have turned around and essentially rejected. It didn’t meet a lot of our standards before they have come back. So in the past, we’ve seen a 3 percent increase on a yearly basis for tonnage.

1:27:27 Trucking has increased. And the other concern that is coming up is locations of landfills and incinerators. Todd recently sent out an article regarding the Saugus incinerator. We no longer truck there. Waste management did own that, but they sold that asset off. Now our waste is going up to Keystone, New Hampshire. It has for the last at least three or four years. We did buy new trailers with our new contract, but this needs to be all regrouped. So we are looking at different options with waste management. We’re looking at a one year contract. We’re looking at three year contracts. We really like longer term contracts where we can lock in prices and know what we’re going to be. So we’re also looking at a five and a 10 year contract. When I looked at the first proposal, like I said, it didn’t have a 3 percent increase every year. That’s too because trash disposal costs have increased anywhere between 3 and 5 percent on an annual basis. So we’ll have to take a look at that. We’ll probably come to some kind of middle ground with that. And then since we take in construction demolition material at our transfer station, we need a facility that’s able to take construction demolition material. There’s only so many facilities available. Keystone, New Hampshire is able to continue to take that material, and they’re able to take that material until at least 2033.

1:28:58 After that time, obviously nobody really knows what the life of some of these landfills are going to begin to have. Eventually, most of our waste will probably end up being trained or trucked to Ohio and other areas. So cost for waste is going to continue to go up. So that’s just a small piece that I want to talk about. But as far as the staff goes there, there’s one issue that we’ve been dealing with. So before we had an admin person that worked on the scale, and then we had additional staff. The transfer station’s open six days a week, so we needed additional staff that could work on Saturday. Some of our long-term staff had left, and so we had to fill in on Saturdays. That continued to be a problem for us. They couldn’t always fill in for cave or vacations or sick time, and therefore I had to fill in at the scale house when these people weren’t there. It’s impossible to run into… We have a department and I have to run the operations of a scale. You don’t have Dr. Bucky teaching a class when the teacher is absent. You don’t have Jason Silva filling in for other departments when they aren’t there, but I have to do that. So we need to kind of fulfill and make sure that we have a full and capable staff. So what we did was this year we were able to take our part-time people and create a full-time position that kind of was able to fill in for Kay if she wasn’t there.

1:30:31 Anytime it was vacation or sick time or had personal time off. So we need to take that person and make them part of our budget. So there will be a slight increase on that. I’m still calculating the costs, but the full-time position for that person is going to be $37,926.95. So that will be at least the increase for that budget as well as the increase for waste management, JRM, and some other costs. We do have to continue to look at our recycling costs and where those are headed. Recycling continues to be an issue. So, you know, I will have to calculate out how much tonnage we’ve had in recycling. Waste management did notify me this year when we were in communications that our tonnage has gone down slightly this year. It’s actually enough that it’s noticeable. The great thing about that is that tonnage is most likely going into food waste, which is exactly where it’s supposed to go. So we now have at least 550 residents signed up for curbside compost collection. We also have a total of six 65-gallon totars at the transfer station that gets picked up at least once a week, often twice a week during the summer. So we are collecting a huge amount of food waste that we’re offsetting our tonnage with, which is a cost savings for the town. Where we are seeing issues is in the recycling. The recycling markets really haven’t crept back up, so we’re still seeing a cost for disposal.

1:32:03 Obviously, curbside costs, we don’t have a cost for, but any material that we’re collecting at the transfer station, if we have to go to JRM, we’re generally paying $74 a ton. We’re not paying for trucking. It’s our own vehicles. But if we’re able to, when we separate out the paper and we bring that over to Salem, we pay it much less or reduce costs to get rid of that. It’s anywhere between $45 and $20 a ton. So there is some savings there. We do a ton of cardboard at the transfer station. Same thing. We’re bringing those over to grief in Salem. That’s not going to JRM. We’re seeing some cost savings with that. But I just have to calculate everything out. So we are asking for some increases for health department staff, some staff in the waste department, but also a slight increase, which is our annual increase for disposal fees. If they’re asking for us to have a level funded, that means that we have to look elsewhere to reduce, so we’re just going to give what we need to give. Now, we’ve never been able to have a truly level funded budget, yes, because of costs increased for trash disposal, and then we’ve always increased costs in the health department based on staffing. So we’ve never truly had a level funded budget. So we don’t have to concern ourselves with that? No. We fight to say, the school department increases are anywhere between 4% and 5% on an annual basis on a $37 million budget.

1:33:42 So I think that the town, this is a major piece that everybody uses on a curbside basis, the transfer station, and it’s something that we continue to offer these services to the town. One last question. You were talking about new contracts. Didn’t you say you have a five year contract with waste management? No. So we had a five year contract. We’re entering into our last year. Oh, I thought you said it was a 10 year contract. I misunderstood you. No, we have a 10 year contract with JRM and we’re entering into our fifth year. That’s with JRM. So it’s waste management after. Are you getting bids from other groups or is this just the one? So with waste, I don’t have to follow up the normal procurement processes. And so we have always done curbside collection. Last time we did curbside collection, we received three proposals. We’ve always just dealt with waste management. They own some of the only facilities that we could technically truck to because of the construction demolition material. Thank you. We are unhappy and unable to settle with waste management. We will put it out to bid. And we don’t have the FinCom meeting set yet. They haven’t said. No, we have not received any communication with the FinCom, which is a little disappointing because we report to the FinCom. The FinCom makes recommendations at town meeting. In the last couple of years, things are starting to change,

1:35:16 which I’m a little concerned about where we’ve now last year, Helene and I met with the town administrator. He wanted to understand our budget. We agreed to meet with them to say, this is what we’re doing. But we usually talk to the FinCom and Todd this year. Again, today he said, well, I’m going to be setting up these meetings for next week. I’ll let you know what time you have. So I would, you know, we’ll need to try to figure that out because usually the chair has come with me to these meetings. It is a little different. And I’m trying to figure out why the finance committee is allowing this to be different. But I haven’t heard anything from them. What does that have to do with the vacancies that we have? I don’t know if the town has in the finance department. It’s possible. But, you know, I thought the town had a certain structure where, you know, departments that did not fall underneath the select bin only dealt with the finance committee. And then town meeting. But there’s vacancies within the finance department. That’s correct. They just hired a new person. I think she started this week who’s going to be the go to person. Emma, I forget her last name. Who gave this new format? If there were, was this from the town administrator or through the finance committee? My understanding is from the town administrator. With all this is going on, we need a new format.

1:36:53 That’s what I said. Between the pandemic and the vacancies? That’s correct. But everybody’s accepting of it. Nobody said they’re not doing it. We’re accepting it. We’re going to try and get it done. You’re very silent. Well, Todd talked to Jason, so I’m not going to speak for Todd. No, I think it’s up for discussion that we can now as a board discuss it and say that we’re over our heads. And here we’re doing all this busy work of writing goals and mission statements, which I call busy work when we’re trying to get shots in people’s arms. I think that the issue is that it’s not… So there’s this new way of doing the budget, which is a townwide thing in every department from us to the school to ones that are under the auspices of the selectmen all have to do the same continuity. That was my understanding from talking to Jason. But we told the week before it’s due. We will not show six months before it’s due. Yeah, I mean, the timing is tight, but I don’t think we have an option to opt out of this. Well, we have an option to do anything that we vote to do, I would think. I mean, I don’t… I can work on it this week. If we don’t get it accomplished, I mean, we all can work on it this week. We can all give it our best shot. But it seems like it’s an awful…

1:38:26 And obviously it’ll be taken away from COVID work. What I’m saying is an awful lot of work for Andrew, who not only has been working day and night 24 seven since March 1st, he’s now doing this. But the few years before that, he was working with the transfer station. He’s had one major project after another, not because of anybody’s fault. But this is a huge event that’s happening. This is a pandemic, something that hasn’t happened in 100 years and won’t happen again for 100 years. And we’re writing goals and objectives. We know what our goals and objectives are. Get people healthy. Just read our mission statement. So that’s what we write. And we wrote it already. So that’s enough. Maybe you should call them up. Me? I found them last year for something else. But I’d be happy to call it. I just heard this… what, at 2 o’clock this afternoon? When Andrew sent the draft out? Yeah, one time was… I mean, I didn’t read it till 2 o’clock. I don’t know when he sent it out. It might have been 1030, but I didn’t see it till 2 o’clock. I think that we all think the timing is tough, but I think that we also do need to comply. So why don’t we do what we originally said and we’ll just kind of throw something together. We’ll send it to Andrew.

1:40:02 And we can take the burden off of Andrew, the three of us. We’ll just email him what we come up with. Well, and I hope that the three of us will do it jointly. I mean, you’ve got a practice to run and I’ve got my… that I do. I think Andrew’s going to email it to us. We have a good framework and we can go off of that. I don’t think the first year that they do this, we have to have perfection. I think that we can have a general idea of where we’re going with it. And if you recall last year, or last time when we wrote goals, it must have taken us four or five different meetings. So we’ve already got them. Yeah, but they have nothing to do with the pandemic. No, but it’s still the health department goals and we’ll add a pandemic one or two. So, and I think the last thing I want to state about this is that usually with goals comes a request for money to accomplish those goals. Which is why it’s in the budget. But we don’t have a budget. We don’t have a budget for goals. We have a budget for employees. That’s it. But if we need to… We have a budget for waste disposal, but we don’t have a health budget for anything outside of employees and some water quality testing. Well, we’ll attach some of the staff to our goals. Obviously our staff are all in tax with doing what they’re usually doing. So if you’re going to set goals, you should be asking for some more money too.

1:41:38 More than what we’re asking for? Yeah. All right. We know that town resources are strapped right now as it is. Well, when Jason Silva sees this, maybe he’ll realize that I’m going to make a phone call to him. All right. So we’ll do our homework. Don’t go crazy everybody, but we’ll get something to Andrew by the end of the week. Then who’s going to put it together? I’ll put it together. All right. So we’re going to meet next Tuesday? Looks that way, doesn’t it? Yep. At 7.30? Yeah. Okay. Is that it? That’s it. So we have a motion to adjourn. I’ll make a motion to adjourn. Second. On the Scott lead. In favor. Ms. Hazlett. In favor. Dr. Belfbecker. In favor.