COVID-19 illustration by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
BARNSTABLE – Though the CDC has reported that Barnstable County has moved up to the medium transmission category for COVID-19, local and state health officials are saying that the pandemic has evolved and there is less cause for concern.
Falmouth Health Agent Scott McGann said during his bi-weekly community update that the region has come a long way since the start of the pandemic, with less overall enforced mitigation measures.
He said that this allows COVID to spread more easily, but there are also fewer severe cases and deaths warranting such measures.
“Things aren’t shut down. We’re back to essentially normal living for most of us, so it has more of an opportunity, but it’s not causing the same rate of hospitalizations and deaths that the previous versions were. If we were doing the same thing with previous versions, we’d be in a lot worse shape in terms of hospitalizations and so forth,” said McGann.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health recently said that it was also going to scale back how often it provided COVID case count updates as mitigation tools become more and more accessible.
Barnstable County moved to the CDC’s medium transmission category by having 10.1 new COVID admissions at local hospitals per 100,000 residents. The trigger point is 10 new admissions.
“We are medium—barely. We’re high-low or low-medium, depending on how you look at it. In terms of hospitalizations it’s not out of control, it’s just that we did go above 10,” said McGann.
He said that by all other metrics, from hospital capacity to overall case counts, Barnstable County has little spread.
At medium transmission, the CDC recommends masking around those at high risk for severe illness.
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