Provincetown Positivity Rate, Active COVID Cases Drop: Patch PM

MASSACHUSETTS — It's Monday, August 2. Here's what you should know this afternoon:

• The man accused of shooting and killing Yarmouth police Sgt. Sean Gannon is about to begin, with the jury selection process happening this week.
• A Saugus woman was found dead off a hiking trail on Camelback Mountain in Pheonix, AZ on Friday.
• This year's Peabody West Little League All-Star team is writing another chapter in the storied history of the program.
• Melrose High School Principal Jason Merrill says it's time to remove the school's Red Raider mascot.

Scroll down for more on those and other stories Patch has been covering in Massachusetts today.

Today's Top Story

The coronavirus situation in Provincetown is improving, with both active cases and positivity rates seeing steady declines, town officials said.

The number of active coronavirus cases among Provincetown residents decreased from 103 on Friday to 59 on Monday. This means more than 70 percent of the 231 town residents who contracted COVID-19 during the outbreak have recovered.

"We are well on our way to containment," Town Manager Alex Morse said in a statement. "The number of people recovering each day far exceeds the number of new cases being added. We are optimistic this will continue."

Morse said the town's positivity test rate has also continued to drop. On July 15, Provincetown's COVID-19 outbreak was at its worst with, 15.1 percent of tests coming back positive. Positive test rates hit a new post outbreak low of 3.3 percent on Saturday, though the rate did see a slight increase to 4 percent on Sunday.

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Monday's Other Top Stories

Trial for man accused of killing Sgt. Gannon begins: Jury selection began Monday for the man accused of killing Yarmouth police Sgt. Sean Gannon and wounding his police K-9. Thomas Latanowich, 32, of Somerville, was charged with first-degree murder, mistreating a police dog and seven other charges in connection to the shooting and death of Gannon on April 12, 2018. The jury selection for his trial at Barnstable Superior Court is expected to take about a week, with 50 potential jurors being called each day. Testimonies are slated to begin Monday.

Questions surround MA woman's death in AZ: A Saugus woman was found dead off a hiking trail on Camelback Mountain in Pheonix, AZ on Friday. Police say, Angela Tramonte, 31, was visiting her new boyfriend for the first time, who she met on Instagram just two months before when the two decided to go on a hike. Fire officials in Pheonix say Tramonte got too hot for the trail and decided to turn around. Her hiking partner, who friends say is a police officer and first responder, wanted to continue to the top, so the pair split up leaving Tramonte to walk down the trail alone in July heat.

Peabody one step closer to Little League World Series: This year's Peabody West Little League All-Star team is writing another chapter in the storied history of the program. The 12-year-old All-Stars became the latest in the program to win a state championship with a 6-5 victory against Pittsfield on Sunday afternoon in Gloucester. Peabody West now travels to Bristol, Connecticut to begin the New England Championships starting on Saturday.

Mansfield meth lab: The scene has been declared safe, and residents can now return home to 17 Fulton Place in Mansfield after police and firefighters evacuated the building due to the finding of an active drug lab. Police and fire personnel responded to a request for medical assistance to 17 Fulton Place in Mansfield around 1:22 a.m. Monday. Once they arrived, they found a man who needed help due to demonstrating irrational and strange behavior.

Eat fresh: Patch's 2021 Massachusetts Farmers Market Guide

Picture This

Stoughton woman pushes for COVID-19 memorial: Massachusetts photographer Keith Jacobs died of COVID-19 in April 2020, only weeks into the pandemic, just has he'd made it to the top of a list to receive a kidney transplant. His widow, Marcy Jacobs, 64, of Stoughton, Massachusetts, said she fears her late husband and other pandemic victims will be forgotten as the disease wanes and people who didn't lose a loved one move on. The process of creating more lasting remembrances that honor the over 600,000 Americans who have died from the coronavirus, though, is fraught compared to past memorial drives because of the politics.

They Said It

"We know that the red raider has also been depicted as a Viking, a bandit, and even has ties to a WWII fighter squadron. But, I simply cannot deny the connection between the red raider or raider and offensive Native American imagery"

• Melrose High School Principal Jason Merrill, saying it's time to remove the school's Red Raider mascot. In a statement to the Melrose community Monday, Merrill says he wants to start a collaborative plan with students and the community to remove the red raider and identify a new mascot during the upcoming school year.

By The Numbers

4:02.40: Heather MacLean's time in the 1,500 meters Sunday night in Tokyo. The Peabody Veterans Memorial High and UMass-Amherst alumna raced in the third heat of the preliminaries, earning a place in one of the two 12-runner semifinals Wednesday morning.