Baker lifting business limits, boosting vaccine recipients
Shot access expanded to full range of health workers
More health care workers, including those who work with patients in their homes, are eligible to receive COVID-19 vaccines as of Thursday, Gov. Charlie Baker announced, opening up eligibility to the full suite of priority groups included in the first phase of his three-fold vaccine distribution plan.
Meanwhile, the governor also announced he will lift the 9:30 p.m. curfew that he imposed in November on restaurants and other businesses, effective Monday, citing improvements to COVID-19 metrics since the start of the year.
The post-December holiday season spike in COVID-19 activity was not as severe as the surge that followed Thanksgiving, the governor said, and the 30% drop in the positivity rate, 30% drop in new cases and 10% drop in hospitalizations that have materialized since Jan. 1 suggest it is time to begin easing up on some restrictions.
“These have been long and hard days for everybody, but our hospital system was able to continue to provide medical care for residents. And today, three weeks into 2021, our public health data is trending in a better direction for some categories like hospitalizations and the percent of positive COVID cases for the first time in a long time,” Baker said. He added, “Vaccines are reaching residents, positive case rates and hospitalizations have stabilized; those trends are moving in the right direction. As a result, we believe it’s OK and it’s time to start a gradual easing of some of the restrictions we put in place in the fall.”
The governor will also lift the state’s stay-at-home advisory effective Monday at 5 a.m., he said.
“While today’s announcement reflects another step toward normalcy, we still have a lot of work ahead of us to suppress the pandemic once and for all and to fully reopen our economy,” Baker said.
While restaurants, health clubs, casinos, movie theaters, and other businesses will be able to stay open later than 9:30 p.m. next week, they will still not be allowed to fill their places of business to greater than 25%. Baker announced that restriction, which initially took effect Dec. 26, will remain in place for at least another two weeks, until Feb. 8.
Earlier on Thursday, speaking from Gillette Stadium, which opened this week as a mass vaccination site, Baker said the first phase represents a “commitment to preserving our health care capacity and protecting some of the most vulnerable residents here in the
commonwealth and making sure we have an equitable distribution process.”
Health care workers involved in pandemic response, first responders, the staff and residents of long-term care facilities and congregate care sites like shelters, prisons and group homes have already been able to receive the shots.
The newly eligible groups include personal care attendants, home health and hospice workers, nurses and others who perform home visits, dentists, medical and nursing students, physical therapists, hospital interpreters, behavioral health clinicians, blood donation workers, podiatrists, substance use disorder treatment program staff, asthma and allergy specialists, school nurses, clergy members who work with patients, acupuncturists and more, according to a state website that provides more details on each phase of the vaccine plan.
“The decision to immediately begin vaccinating more than 100,000 home health aides and Personal Care Attendants (PCAs) will protect some of the most vulnerable frontline health care workers and their mostly-elderly, chronically ill or disabled clients in private homes across the Commonwealth,” Tim Foley, executive vice president of the health care workers union 1199SEIU, said. “Home health aides and PCAs are the unsung heroes of the pandemic. By serving elderly, ill or disabled patients in their own homes, they take an enormous burden off our severely strained hospital and long-term care facilities and their staffs while making certain that our most vulnerable population receives highquality care without being exposed to trips into the community.”
Massachusetts Dental Society President MaryJane Hanlon thanked the administration for opening up the vaccine distribution, noting that dental teams are “health care professionals who make their livelihoods within inches of patients’ mouths and potentially infectious aerosols” and have the “prowess at providing injections” to help with vaccination efforts once they are inoculated themselves.
Baker encouraged anyone who falls into the vaccine distribution plan’s first phase to find a vaccine site near them and get the shots.
“Phase one is now for all intents and purposes open, and we’ll have more to say about when we think the eagle will land on phase two the beginning of the week when we hear a little more about the pipeline,” Baker said.
The second of the three vaccine-distribution phases, envisioned to start at some point next month, includes individuals with multiple conditions that put them at high risk of COVID-19 complications, people age 65 and older, workers in sectors including early and K-12 education, transit, grocery, utilities, public health and the court system, among others.
Baker said he hadn’t spoken to anyone in the new Biden administration about vaccines since Wednesday’s inauguration, and most of the conversations before President Joe Biden and his team took office “were really around this whole issue of visibility into the pipeline.”
Having insight into vaccine availability status at the federal level gives the state an idea of when it can expand distribution, the governor said.
“At this point in time, the major message we got at this point in transition is to expect at least what we got the last few weeks, which is around 80,000 doses a week,” Baker said. “The Biden administration has talked about 100 million doses in 100 days. That would be about a 25% increase from the 800,000 doses that are currently in people’s arms on a daily basis” nationally.
Baker said he expects the new White House to have a “much better appreciation about what the pipeline looks like” over the next 10 days to two weeks, and then hopefully pass that information along to states and providers. Over that same time period, Baker said, people should expect to see “a lot more site infrastructure in Massachusetts.”
The state currently has 150 vaccine sites, he said, including the large-scale operation at Gillette Stadium. A second mass vaccination site, at Fenway Park, is slated to open Feb. 1. He said 825,650 doses of vaccine have been shipped to providers here as of the end of Wednesday, and 377,459 of those have been administered.
“We can’t plan to build infrastructure if we don’t know what’s coming,” Baker said later in the day at a State House press conference. “Generally speaking our visibility into what we can expect is one week. That makes it hard to draw conclusions about how far you can go beyond that process.”