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Update at 6:10 p.m.
In its largest one-day report, Martha’s Vineyard Hospital reported 20 new cases of COVID-19 over the weekend, a worrying sign for the island as it continues to see a spike in confirmed cases.
In a phone call with The Times, the Tisbury health worker and spokesperson for health boards Maura Valley confirmed that at least seven of the 20 cases were employees of Cronig’s Market, which is considered a cluster after 10 of its employees have tested positive for the virus. Contact tracing is ongoing on all cases to determine where others may have contracted the virus. Valley said some of Cronig’s cases are symptomatic while others are not.
“I think it’s definitely community spread. What we see are families and social groups, but we’re still looking for connections and trying to figure out what it all means, ”Valley said.
In response to numerous calls from Cronig customers, Valley said close contacts are people who have been six feet or more from a positive person for more than 15 minutes in a one-day period.
“Most customers at a grocery store wouldn’t meet the definition of close contact. If people who have purchased from Cronig’s are concerned, they can schedule a test through TestMV, ”Valley said. “Concerns about risk factors due to underlying conditions should be addressed with their primary care physician.”
Earlier Monday morning, health workers on the island met with the hospital to discuss the increase in cases. The hospital returned to Incident Command, a set of protocols it had used earlier this year when the pandemic first hit.
The Incident Command is the hospital’s emergency preparedness mode. The hospital has a daily exercise where they snuggle up and call management to discuss what’s going on with the hospital’s operations. Now in charge of incidents, the hospital is focusing its daily discussions on the increase in cases.
“This is how we do our exercises, it’s improved communication,” hospital CEO Denise Schepici said on a call with The Times Monday night. “We go through the supplies, the personnel, the current state. It is a mechanism for creating closer communication around emergency preparedness. We exercise it, whether it is a COVID, a bomb threat, a fire or an emergency.
The hospital is not interrupting or closing any services at this time.
According to head nurse and COO Claire Seguin, who was on the same call, figuring out when or not to enter incident command is a data-driven choice. Once the emergency that caused it disappears, the hospital stops the incident control.
Now, health boards and the hospital are working on community outreach to educate people about community spread, wearing masks, social distancing and stopping social gatherings outside of families, according to Valley.
Schepici said that in the future, the hospital will work with health workers to focus on the density of gatherings and educate people not to be complacent.
“This is the time we said we might be more vulnerable to the outbreak, the weather is getting colder, people are close, COVID fatigue. I know everyone is tired, ”Schepici said.
She added that while many people have continued to practice good masking and social distancing practices, the ones that don’t create a problem for everyone.
The spike in cases in recent weeks stands in stark contrast to the first six months of the pandemic, especially the summer when the island saw an influx of tourists.
“That’s what’s so frustrating,” Valley said. “You would think ‘oh wow we’ve been doing it all summer’ and we had people safe and safe and we still had a lot of people being tested. I don’t know what to attribute it to except that we are starting to see a community spreading… It is very disappointing.
None of the new hospital cases were hospitalized or transferred over the weekend, according to Seguin, but the majority of the new cases were symptomatic.
“We mainly do symptomatic testing for the patients here, so I would say yes, almost all of them had symptoms,” Seguin said.
Schepici said the island couldn’t let its guard down despite what she called “COVID fatigue”.
“It’s disappointing,” Schepici said. “It’s not surprising when you organize large gatherings. It started with the wedding four weeks ago and now we have the cluster at Cronig. It happens when a lot of people are close together, not wearing masks, and changing the behaviors that we used to do so well.
The surge in hospital cases continues an alarming trend for the island which has registered 53 new cases in the past two weeks. The peak began on October 26 when a cluster of cases were linked to a marriage on the island. Health boards have confirmed that at least 10 cases have since been linked to the marriage.
Those 53 cases over the past two weeks represent 37 percent of the island’s 141 confirmed cases. The remaining 63% of cases were reported within eight months, when testing began in March.
TestMV has now tested 19,514 people since testing began in May. Of these, 47 tested positive, 19,021 negative results and 446 pending results. The town of Aquinnah is also conducting its own tests. Aquinnah has tested 312 people with zero positives, 305 negative results and seven pending results.
Monday’s 20 new cases affected all age categories in addition to those over 70. There were six new cases in their forties, four in their thirties, three in their twenties, three in their fifties, two in their sixties and two under the age of 20.
Of the 141 total confirmed cases, 78 are women and 63 are men. A total of 29 are in their twenties, 28 in their thirties, 25 in their fifties, 18 are under 20, 18 in their forties, 16 in their sixties and seven are over 70.
Health boards reported on Friday that of all the confirmed cases, 103 are no longer symptomatic and have been released from isolation. One has been lost to follow-up and the others are being followed by public health officials. The number of non-symptomatic individuals released from isolated individuals is updated every Friday.
Updated to include comments from hospital officials – Ed.
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