How to get on Natick’s COVID-19 vaccine clinic list

February 1, 2021 by Bob Brown Leave a Comment

Natick’s Board of Health has arranged for residents of the town only to get on a list for upcoming COVID-19 vaccine clinics. You can sign up to be notified by email or text. Clinics to date have filled up quickly as a result of demand far exceeding supply of the vaccine.

Like other area communities, Natick is only getting about 100 doses at a time. The initial round went to first responders, and now we’re on to other eligible categories, including people age 75-plus.

Even if you are shut out of Natick clinics you can try other clinics throughout the state via the Mass.gov vaccine locator page.

Natick’s Health Department has been getting hundreds of calls per day about vaccines, and while the town would love to offer more clinics, it simply is not getting enough supply to do that.

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Natick School Committee meeting: deciding on whether to jump into the pool

January 26, 2021 by Deborah Brown Leave a Comment

With the Natick High School boys basketball team on a two-week pause due to its recent close contact with infected team members of the Needham High hoops team, and a high number of individuals in town passing through multiple pod groups (the cousin group! The team group!), community spread in Natick keeps on spreading.

“Life outside of school impacts life inside of school,” Superintendent Anna Nolin noted during the Jan. 26th School Committee meeting, held via Zoom.

Nolin during the meeting asked the SC to research and consider the idea of entering into a free 6-week pool-testing program offered by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE). What’s pool testing? Hint: it’s got nothing to do with the chlorine levels at Longfellow.

Pooled testing from a public health perspective means combining approximately 10 – 25 respiratory swab samples into a batch (or “pool”) and then conducting a single laboratory test on the combined pool of samples to detect COVID cases.

Pooling resources

According to the CDC, pooling is useful in scenarios such as returning teachers and students to school because it allows labs to test more samples with fewer testing materials. If a pooled test result comes back negative, then all the samples can be presumed negative with the single test, and the individuals tested as part of that pool may stay in school. If the pooled test result comes back positive, then each of the individuals in the pool who provided a sample will need to be tested individually to determine which samples are positive.

If Natick goes with the DESE program, swab testing would be performed once per week. Test results would come back in 24 – 48 hours.

Although the 6-week swab-testing program is free, ancillary costs are not.

One issue is staffing. As things stand right now, Natick’s nursing staff is flat-out with contact tracing and its accompanying paperwork, and has no time to do the hands-on nursing work of administering the swab tests. SC member Julie McDonough said, “I think we have to make some changes in what our nurses are doing and where they’re spending their time.”

In addition, families must be convinced that pool testing is a good idea. Significant buy-in is essential or the program won’t work. That means families must be educated about the advantages of this kind of testing; waivers must be signed; and students must be made available to take the tests. In addition, it is likely that many community volunteers would be needed, adding another logistical layer of training.

Part of the argument for joining in with the pool-testing program is that it may accelerate a return to full-time in-person school.

Although a step toward a return to school will likely to be achieved as soon as teachers are vaccinated, Nolin emphasized that vaccinated teachers does not mean that students or families are vaccinated. Therefore, safety measures such as a continuation of mask-wearing and maintaining social distancing of 6-feet would need to continue, along with a hybrid model of learning, for the foreseeable future. If a 6-feet distance needs to be maintained, then the schools cannot put full-time, in-person learning back into place due to space constraints.

Once the general population is vaccinated it is possible that herd immunity would allow a return to regular school in fall. Pool testing, and the data it would generate, could help accelerate this process.

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Natick Health Dept. getting hundreds of COVID-19 vaccine calls a day

January 26, 2021 by Bob Brown Leave a Comment

Natick Director of Public Health Jim White said during Tuesday’s Board of Health meeting that his office is getting inundated with questions about the COVID-19 vaccine, but the reality is that people largely need to get their vaccine answers from the state for now. The Commonwealth this week announced that those eligible to get the vaccine under Phase 2 of its plan will be allowed to do so come Feb. 1, and regional mass vaccination sites and commercial partners like CVS are being prioritized.

It’s not that the town doesn’t want to help. It just doesn’t have as much vaccine as it would like to have.

“We at the local health departments are getting a little frustrated because we were told that the ones that were approved to do the vaccinations and hold the clinics were told that there was going to be a cap for the communities,” White said. Around here, that cap is at 100 doses at a time, whereas harder hit communities have higher caps.

Natick doled out its first 200 doses to first responders and others eligible under Phase 1 of the state’s timeline. The town’s current supply of 100 doses is already spoken for through a public clinic slated for Jan. 27 that filled up quickly on Friday after the state linked to the registration page before the town even had a chance to promote it. That resulted in some who weren’t eligible under Phase 1 of the state’s vaccine plan to be removed from the list, but they were quickly replaced on Monday by those who live or work in Natick and did qualify.

The supply is short statewide. “We were told that out of all the vaccine that has been given to the state of Massachusetts, 98% of it has already been distributed,” White said he was told during a call with the state’s Department of Public Health. “We’re all keeping our fingers crossed. You can open up all the vaccination sites we can, but we’ve got to have the vaccine in order to run the vaccination sites.”

Natick doesn’t have a next clinic planned yet, as it waits to find out what kind of supply it will get next, and when.

White assures that if Natick got more doses it could handle many more vaccinations. While the Health Department’s staff is stretched, the town has lots of volunteers and tens of thousands of dollars in grants (including a MetroWest Health Foundation grant) that could be used to supplement its staff. The town could dispense more vaccine per clinic and hold more clinics to meet demand, he said, if it had more doses.

Hopes that teachers, now in the last section of Phase 2, might get vaccinated during February break doesn’t look likely. They’re more likely to get shots toward the end of February or beginning of March, even as the state urges more schools to get kids back in physical classrooms.

The Health Department was inundated with calls about vaccines over the past week and weekend regarding, White says. Just when it looked like the inquiries might be calming down, the state on Monday made its Phase 2 announcement regarding those age 75 and above being eligible for the vaccine come Feb. 1, and it started all over again.

Natick has collected resources online, including links to state vaccine information, on the town website. The town is also setting up a phone bank at the Natick Community-Senior Center to support those who might not have computers or be handy with them, so that they can arrange to be vaccinated. The town is willing to give vaccines to the homebound and reach out to public and senior housing residents when more doses become available.

The town has also reached out to CVS, and the Health Department is confident that the West Central Street site could be well equipped to handle drive-through vaccinations. But that CVS doesn’t have any supply yet either.

White says he’s hoping that new federal efforts to step up production will have good results. “We would love to get as many of the vaccines into people’s arms as quick as possible,” he said.

Overall, COVID-19 numbers are heading in the right direction locally, with Natick remaining in the state’s “yellow” level (the middle). The state’s positivity rate dropping below 5% is encouraging, after hitting 8%, White said. The town has been holding steady of late with about 150-155 people in isolation. The lack of COVID-19 transmission within Natick Public Schools has also been a good sign.

Despite the better numbers, Natick health officials are urging the public to stay vigilant, especially wth new and more contagious variants on the rise.

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Natick COVID-19 update: Town stays in the yellow, Health Dept in vaccine program for long run

January 15, 2021 by Bob Brown Leave a Comment

During his appearance at this week’s Select Board meeting, Natick Director of Public Health Jim White said despite the town’s COVID-19 numbers heading in the wrong direction, calculations showed that the town would likely remain at the “yellow” (aka, middle) level of the state’s color-coded rating system.

Sure enough, the weekly data released on Jan. 14 showed Natick dodging the dreaded “red” level, which in Natick’s case would mean 10 or more cases on average over the past 14 days per 100,000 residents and a 5% or greater positivity rate from those tested. Natick tallied a scary high 49.4 average cases per day, but a 4.69% positivity rate, the latter of which kept Natick out of the red (that percentage was up from 4.59% the previous week). Going back a couple of months ago, Natick’s positivity rate was well under 1%.

The Natick Health Department is powering ahead with vaccine dissemination, in partnership with Wayland, initially with 200 doses of Moderna vaccine for first responders. Who gets vaccines when is being dictated by the state, but vaccines are being dispensed locally or regionally. Natick and Wayland took a different approach to vaccinations than Wellesley, which staggered vaccinations across six clinics with first responders so that not too many were getting it, and possibly feeling side effects, at once. Natick and Wayland doled out 96 doses on its first day of its clinic, which White stressed was only for first responders and was pre-registration only.

White said that the Natick Health Department has been approved to continue on with the vaccination program during the other phases of the state’s plan. “Some of the steps that are coming up are integrated with many different sectors, so we just need to make sure we are adhering to what the phases and the steps are, because as they say we can’t jump the line with anybody,” he said. “We’re going to continue to move on and do exactly what we’re told…”

More vaccines can’t come soon enough for Natick, which has seen a post-holiday COVID-19 case surge. “It’s been a little more than we expected,” White said.

Natick hit a high point (in a bad way) on Jan. 6 of 171 confirmed positive cases that were in isolation, and numbers started to wane over the weekend. Then they spiked again to 181 on Jan. 13, the day White gave his briefing. “It’s concerning to us when you look at what the metrics are as far as the state goes,” he said.

To put some of the current numbers in perspective, Natick didn’t hit its first 500 cases, from the start of the pandemic in March, until Oct. 1. Natick tallied 513 cases for November and December, and January is trending higher.

“We’re just holding out hope with the vaccination program going that we’re getting over the hump, we’re hopefully getting past the surge of the holidays, and we’re hopefully starting to see things go down,” White said.

One way the Health Department, in conjunction with the police, tries to contain the spread of the virus is by investigating complaints related to alleged violations of state orders. The department has investigated over 700 such complaints since the start of the pandemic, White said. Cease-and-desist and violation orders, as well as fines, can result.

While much of the current vaccine and COVID-19 information is accessible via the Commonwealth’s Mass.gov website, getting White’s local insights are valuable. It would be great if the Health Department and Natick Pegasus would consider recording Health Department meetings, none of which have been posted since September. No meeting minutes since then either, though thankfully, you can find minutes from the Jan. 11 meeting on the Protect Natick’s Future site.

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Natick small businesses score nearly $800K in state grants

January 6, 2021 by Bob Brown Leave a Comment

The Commonwealth has announced a new $67.4 million round of COVID-19 Small Business Grants, and 16 Natick businesses are among the mainly minority- and women-owned recipients. Among them are Oga’s Japanese Cuisine, management consulting firm ESS Analysis, and marketing and data analytics firm WebReply. Health care, professional service, and construction firms were also among recipients.

Oga's — Oga’s scored a $75K grant from the state

These awards follow an initial round of $49 million in grants, also for businesses hit by the pandemic, that included 11 Natick outfits.

The awards this time around go to 1,366 businesses, and for Natick companies, the grants range from $10,000 to $75,000 for a total of $785,000.

The grants are administered via the Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation, which is also now accepting applications for a new Sector-Specific Small Business Relief Grant Program that will give preference to industries such as bars and restaurants, gyms, personal services, and more. The grants are to be used for payroll, rent, and other expenses.

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