Peabody Board Of Health Issues Indoor Mask Recommendation

PEABODY, MA — The Peabody Board of Health is strongly recommending the city adopt an indoor mask mandate for municipal buildings and schools regardless of vaccination status following a meeting Monday afternoon to discuss a response to a two-month rise in coronavirus rates on the North Shore.

Director of Health and Human Services Sharon Cameron told Patch Tuesday morning that she hopes the School Committee will adopt the recommendation when it meets Tuesday night and that Mayor Ted Bettencourt will adopt it for municipal buildings.

The Board of Health also said it also "strongly recommends" that all businesses ask their employees and customers to wear masks indoors, but that for now, at least, that will remain a recommendation.

"The Board is not going to be, at this time, issuing any mandate on business owners," Cameron told Patch. "The (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) guidance (based on local transmission levels) is to require masks. We really hope that businesses are adopting that as well. But we won't be enforcing that on local businesses."

As for schools and municipal buildings, Cameron said the Board of Health has worked collaboratively with the schools and city well for the 18 months of the pandemic and that she hopes they will give the recommendation the strong consideration it deserves.

"We are concerned about the data," she said. "We are concerned about the (delta variant of the) disease that is much more infectious than it was last year."

Cameron noted that there had to be 900 quarantines within Peabody Public Schools over the course of last school year when there were substantially more restrictions in place than there will be when school starts in the next two weeks.

"The theme is that we all want kids to be in school as much as possible," Cameron said. "We had a lot of different strategies layered last year with social distancing, masking, and overall restrictions about what people were doing in the community. A lot of that has been removed this year. But we feel masking is one step we can take to help protect students."

The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on Tuesday voted to institute an indoor mask mandate statewide for all public schools for at least one month, with conditions on lifting it tied to an individual school's staff and student vaccination rate.

Peabody Superintendent of Schools Josh Vadala told Patch earlier this month that the School Committee would take the next four weeks of data into consideration before making a final recommendation for the fall, but that he hoped to make vaccinations and mask-wearing as much of a family choice as possible.

Board of Health data shows that 61 percent of eligible 12- to 15-year-olds in Peabody have been vaccinated with one dose against the coronavirus, while 49 percent are fully vaccinated. Among 16 to 19-year-olds, 70 percent have received one dose with 63 percent fully vaccinated.

Data shows that some city populations, including those of Hispanic residents, lag significantly behind the general population.

While the statewide coronavirus cases and positivity rate appear to have leveled off in recent weeks after rising throughout the summer — the seven-day positive test rate rolling average reported Monday was 2.58 percent, down from a recent high of 2.82 percent on Aug. 17 —the overall trend in Peabody has been higher throughout the past two months.

The Board of Health said the rate per 100,000 residents went from 0.5 on June 24 to 12.5 on Aug. 19, while the percent positivity went from 0.4 percent to 2.58 percent.

The percentage of cases involving those under 19 years old has remained steady at 17 percent, while "breakthrough" infections of fully vaccinated residents account for 35 percent of all probable and confirmed cases in Peabody.

"The Board of Health strives to protect the health of all Peabody residents and staff while recognizing the importance of keeping our society open," it said in the recommendation letter. "Keeping our students safe and in school full-time is a priority we all share.

"Given the increased transmissibility of the delta variant, the decreased physical distancing in public places as well as in most classrooms this fall, and the difficulty of reliably ascertaining the vaccination status of individuals in a public setting, the Peabody Health Department strongly recommends that all individuals, regardless of vaccination status, wear a mask in indoor public settings, including within Peabody Public Schools and Peabody municipal buildings."

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)

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